The Forsaken
by Hunter Kid
Summary: I always found it striking that Luke had so much ability with the Force, yet his twin sister did not. My conclusion is that Leia's powers are latent, and this story explores what could happen once she begins to experiment with her powers.
1. Heir to a Dark Legacy

"You should not have come back here."

She stood wordlessly, her dark eyes boring holes in the tall figure before her.

"Do you hear me, girl?"

She nodded.

His anger radiated from him, nearly palpable. "Then why have you returned?"

She smiled humorlessly. "A lapse in judgment, perhaps," she replied calmly. "But I think you know why I've come back. And I know you won't turn me away."

He turned his back on her. "You know nothing," he rasped, his tone dark. "You knew nothing when you first arrived in this place, and you know nothing now. Now leave here. You are not permitted within these walls."

She clenched her fist. "No."

"You will not leave?" His voice was ice and acid.

"But how could you ignore me when you know what is happening?" Hers was a strange mixture of pride and desperation.

He didn't respond.

"You _must_ help me! Help _us_!" She ground her teeth. "Please! For all-"

He cut her off. "No." Cold, hard, final.

She stared at him disbelievingly, knowing the inevitability of his decision, refusing to believe that he could actually make it. "How can-"

"_Leave_," he grated.

Disbelief changed to anger, and her old temper, which she had once thought safely buried, surfaced in a rush that she was powerless to stop. The condemnations poured from her mouth. "You short-sighted fool!" she spat, derision heavily lacing her words. "I will make you regret this, I swear it on my brother's grave! I'm going to tear you down, do you hear me, you pathetic, blind old monster?"

He turned, his gleaming, alien eyes ablaze with wrath. Her gaze was fixed to those eyes for a fleeting moment, before she realized that she had pushed him too far. That was the one thing she'd sworn not to do when she returned to this place, yet her fury had gotten the better of her, and now she stared at the ancient eyes that held old, old powers and a reawakened rage, directed solely at her.

"You desecrate these hallowed grounds with your tongue," he rumbled, his deep voice powerful and commanding, and posessed of a somehow terrifying hollow quality.

The fear started to overcome her, then she stopped, gritted her teeth, and glowered at him. _Hell,_ she realized with a strange sort of fatalistic courage, _I'm dead anyway. Might as well let my fury burn one last time._

"_You_ desecrate these hallowed grounds by your very existence, you self-absorbed charlatan!" she growled, her rage, now freed from the check of her powerful will, flaring higher with each word. She pulled her lightsaber from her belt, brandishing it challengingly. "You think you're a pretty fucking scary guy, with all your ancient, worthless powers, don't you?" She grinned, tinged by a frenetic mania. "_I am not frightened!_ Fight me, you old wretch!"

His ancient, impossibly powerful energies gathered in a swirling, pulsating vortex around his clenched hands. His voice changed to a pure channel of wrath. "YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE COME BACK HERE!" he roared, his face and body contorting as he amassed his incredible forces around him.

Consumed by her rage, she did not have the sense to be frightened. She attacked.

He screamed and unleashed his power.

--

I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE.

I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE.

I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW.

SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT.

I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE.

PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT.

ONLY THOSE ELEMENTS TIME CANNOT WEAR

WERE MADE BEFORE ME, AND BEYOND TIME I STAND.

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.

--Dante Alighieri, _Inferno_

--

T H E F O R S A K E N

a Star Wars fanfic by

George P. Masologites

(c) 18 March 2000

--

Star Wars is owned by George Lucas and Lucasfilm, Ltd., and is used without permission. If I ever tried to claim that I owned it, I would be thrown into a hellish dungeon where I would be forced to eat Stefan Gagne to live. Or something like that. (That is to say, I'm not getting paid for this, but since there's a powerful impetus urging me to write this, I'm doing it for free, so please don't sue me for copyright infringement, I'm broke. Enjoy.)

Part I: Heir to a Dark Legacy

The way of the wicked is as darkness: they

know not at what they stumble.

--Proverbs 4:19

Luke Skywalker rubbed his eyes irately. "Imperial sympathizers?"

That seemed to be how Admiral Galrond, charged with overseeing the defenses of the forest moon of Endor, wanted to explain away even the most minor disturbances. If anything went wrong, it was due to the actions of 'imperial sympathizers.' If a ship malfunctioned, it was obviously due to the sabotage of 'imperial sympathizers.' If a band of terrorists with no known connection to the Empire in any way whatsoever disturbed the peace anywhere, they were designated as 'imperial sympathizers' and dealt with accordingly. Luke was getting very tired of hearing the term.

The older pilot next to him, Scray Halter, nodded at him. "That's right, Commander. Three of them, in single-pilot craft about the size of an X-wing; they're holding a cargo freighter captive and demanding that we pay a ransom or they'll destroy it."

"What kind of craft are these?" Wedge asked, cracking his knuckles.

Scray brought up a rotating schematic hologram in between the three of them, which Luke and Wedge both looked at, puzzled. "I've never seen this before," Luke mumbled, troubled.

"I have," Scray told him. "It was a prototype attack craft that the Empire had nearly completed before it was destroyed. One of the defectors near the end of the war downloaded it and brought it to us. No one figured it would matter, because either we would all be dead before it was completed or the Empire would be gone so it wouldn't matter anymore."

"But someone's completed it," interjected a young pilot called Rat. It was a bit of a curious name for him, considering that he was a tall, muscular young man of maybe eighteen, somber-faced and handsome. "Someone other than the Empire."

Wedge smirked slightly at him. "You have a real knack for stating the obvious, Rat."

Rat ignored him. "So it's possible that this schematic isn't the correct readout for the craft. The new builders could have altered something."

Scray gazed at the hologram thoughtfully. "Possible, I suppose. But it doesn't matter. Luke, we can't give in to their demands. This is one of the first tests that the Alliance has had to face in the post-imperial era."

Luke chuckled dryly. "I'd hardly say that, but I agree, of course; we can't give in to their demands. They'd probably blow the freighter up anyway to make a point." He looked around at the group of pilots, including a quiet young man called Jason. "It looks like we're going to have to take them out ship-to-ship, since ground-based defenses would pose too great a risk to the freighter."

Not that they had a choice. Admiral Galrond declared that these kidnappers were imperial sympathizers, and Captain Strager, Luke's commanding officer, had handed this little calamity over to Luke to deal with, specifically saying not to try to bargain with the sympathizers, but rather to simply destroy them as efficiently as possible. Luke, who had been consumed by preparations for instructing a class that was to begin two days hence for the past six months, welcomed the opportunity to lead Rogue Squadron again - the first time he'd been able to do so, in fact, since before the Battle of Endor. It was an opportunity marred slightly by Wedge Antilles's extensive tirades against Admiral Galrond, who he considered to be a pompous ass and a worthless military leader. Luke privately wished that Wedge hadn't told him about it.

The squadron contained faces that he did not know well, replacing the men who'd died at Endor. There was Rat: young, probably not even twenty yet, with a carefully guarded expression that gave nothing away. Jason, an inexperienced pilot that Wedge had said had amazing potential, and would probably make an incredible fighter pilot as he got older. Scray Halter, a grizzled old warrior who'd been with with the Alliance since the beginning, who Luke was familiar with but had never flown beside before. He was the sole survivor of Ragnarok Squadron, the rest of his comrades all having been killed at Endor, who, rather than attempt to create and lead a new squadron, had simply requested transfer into Luke's - well, Wedge's, really - unit.

Luke was a little uncomfortable with the notion that he could simply ignore the military for months, then come back and suddenly take control of Rogue Squadron once again. It sat a bit wrong with him, as if he did not _deserve_ to be the commander. Wedge, though, who had been Squadron Leader in Luke's absence, did not seem annoyed by it in the least, and had wholeheartedly welcomed his old companion back to the unit. He had not uttered a word of complaint about his sudden demotion.

_It's not a demotion, really, though,_ Luke mused. Wedge _was_ still the Squadron Leader, which was a little strange, since Luke was actually leading the squad. Wedge had even retained his callsign of Rogue Leader, Strager instructing them that Luke was to be addressed as 'Rogue Commander.' Luke knew that the odd restructuring of the squad was due in no small part to his hero status as the Man Who Killed Darth Vader - as well as the fact that he was the single surviving Jedi - and the higher-ups wanting to please him however they could. It would look pretty bad, after all, to be known as the schmuck who'd attempted to screw over the guy that had saved the entire Alliance's bacon at the Battle of Yavin.

Titles and honorifics mattered little to Luke and Wedge, however, and they were mostly just glad to be flying together once again.

Wedge's eyes glittered with excitement as they planned their assault.

--

Once the craft were in scanning range, Scray immediately pulled up a full readout of them, comparing them to the schematic spinning on a small screen beside him. Rat was right; it was slightly different. The ships they were facing had stronger stabilizers and an altered, more powerful weapons system, but thinner defensive plating and a weaker shield generator. He pulled up as much information as he could find about the weapons system, his eyes widening slightly in alarm.

He spoke into the comlink. "Rogue Commander, you copy? I think we've got a problem here. Rat was right, these ships _have_ been changed a little. The armament's different."

"How different, Rogue Two?" Luke's voice, distorted by the comlink, stil betrayed his concern.

"I'm not sure. I've never seen a ship this small equipped with anything like this before, but it looks like it's some kind of rapid-fire rail gun. My readout says it's probably a helluva lot stronger than our blasters. The good news is that their armor's a lot weaker, so I suggest that we take them out very quickly."

"A rapid-fire rail gun?" Rance Se'karlen echoed, sounding somewhat less than overjoyed at Scray's findings. She was the sole female pilot in the squadron, slightly younger than Luke, highly impulsive, and well-known for her incredible reflexes and superb ability at maneuvering in tight quarters. "This could get messy."

"That's the way to keep up the optimism, Rogue Ten," Pasik Tars, an Endor veteran, commented dryly.

"Optimism," Wedge said, grinning. "Who needs it? Paranoia keeps you on your toes."

Rance laughed. "Paranoia comes as a way of life when flying with you, Wedge."

"Hell with paranoia, Rogue Leader," Dakrill Alems, one of the new additions to the squadron, declared. As with Scray, his own squadron had been decimated in the Battle of Endor, and he'd asked for transfer into the reknowned Rogue Squadron. "Stark raving terror's the way to go. Your reflexes are get _damned_ sharp when you're scared out of your mind."

Pasik Tars chuckled. "Of course, being out of your mind probably won't do your flying any good, Rogue Eleven."

"Good point, Rogue Six," Wedge told him, his grin broader than before. "I'll stick with my paranoia, thank you very much."

Luke ignored his companions' banter. "Listen up, Rogue Squadron. We're coming up on three enemy ships, all powerfully armed. This is a pure offensive, which means no hanging back, no playing it defensive. We fly in, we toast these guys, we fly out, we're home in time for dinner. Make certain that none of your fire hits the freighter. Make certain that the enemy craft do not get a shot off at the freighter before we can destroy them. Take these guys out as fast as possible." They hardly needed to be told any of it, of course, but in this type of encounter, the Squadron Leader was required to give a last minute briefing; although that was not Luke's title, the task had been delegated to him anyway. He glanced over the digital readouts from the onboard scanners quickly. "We're going to be in laser range in thirty seconds. Accelerate to attack speed."

The fight was short and brutal. Rogue Squadron roared in at full speed, laser cannons sending out a fiery rain of death, and two of the altered imperial craft exploded instantly in a brief, violent flare. The third sustained considerable damage but was able to get two shots off from the twin rail guns mounted on the sides of the craft that lanced straight through Rat's ship and grazed Wedge's starboard wing. Before it was able to do more damage, Jason locked on and sent double lasers tearing through its engine. The craft exploded, leaving only dust in its wake.

"We lost Rat," Wedge's voice came through on Luke's comlink. It was remorseful, but not torn: Wedge, a longtime pilot who had been flying since before the destruction of the first Death Star, had seen so many companions die that he was as hardened to it as he ever would be. "And my starboard's roasted a little bit."

"Will you be able to land okay?" Luke inquired, concerned.

"I think so. I've still got pretty good control."

"Good." Luke radioed the cargo freighter, a large, lumbering, unarmed Alcras-B type ship. "Alcras-B, this is Rogue Commander. Do you copy?"

The freighter pilot's relief was almost tangible, even over the comlink. "Copy, Rogue Commander. Thank God you guys finally came along. I was getting pretty worried there for a minute, over."

"Yeah, well, I'm not sure what the hell those ships were, but the area's secure now, Alcras-B. You can continue on your previous course, over."

"Appreciate the help, Rogue Commander," the pilot responded. "Alcras-B, over and out."

--

Princess Leia Organa stood in front of the intricately carved wooden dias at the front of the conference chamber. She faced the Great Council unflinchingly, her voice strong and clear. It made her seem taller than she really was. The other members of the Council, distinguished military leaders or ex-Senators, all, listened intently to her as she spoke.

"I," she began firmly, "am strongly opposed to the reimplementation of the Senate. That body has already once proved that it cannot be trusted to maintain peace and freedom throughout the galaxy, and I, for one, am not willing to simply shove it down the people's throats once again, am not willing to gamble with our hard-won liberty. I believe that setting up an unaltered Senate would make a mockery of all we've tried to accomplish."

Mon Mothma, the Chief of State and chairwoman of the Grand Council, frowned slightly at that. "I don't think you're looking at this from every angle, Princess." Her voice was gentle but carried a commanding authority all the same. "And it would not necessarily have to be an unaltered Senate. In fact, I agree with you that there are some aspects that need to be changed. Many of them I fought for for many years in the old Senate."

Leia nodded. "Indeed, some aspects need changing. A great many aspects, if I may say so, Councillor."

Mon Mothma looked at her serenely, contemplatively. "Obviously you have something specific in mind."

"I do," Leia affirmed. "Three things, as a matter of fact, that I battled for in the old Senate, I feel _must_ be changed before we even so much as consider reinstating it. Firstly, the Senate must not have the authority to enact trade barriers. Second, the Senate must not be permitted to keep and standing army, of droids or otherwise, and third, the system governments would have ultimate authority over the economic and political structures of their own systems, not the Senate."

Admiral Willard scowled. "In other words, for you to consider reinstating the Senate, it would first have to be gutted."

Leia smiled fleetingly. "Call it what you will, Admiral. But I feel if these strict controls - and a great many others - are not placed upon the Senate, it will soon be as corrupt as the old Senate and we'll be right back where we started."

"May I remind you," Willard said humorlessly, "that we are the Alliance to Restore the Republic, Princess Leia? If were to create a powerless Senate - or not create one at all - it seems to me _that_ would be what would truly make a mockery of what we've tried to accomplish."

Her laugh was sharp and cutting. "If our title is truly to be interpreted as strictly as you suggest, Admiral, then we're doomed to go back to right where we started from. We are an alliance to restore the _ideals_ of the Republic, not the exact system with all its flaws."

"Princess, if I may," Admiral Hiram Drayson rumbled, his brows knotting. "I understand where you're coming from, and God knows I feel the same way. But you're taking the idea of restricting Senatorial power too far, Leia. Limiting the Senate's power to enact trade barriers, yes, I can see the utility of that, but to completely forbid them from enacting any trade barrier of any kind? And a standing army is a necessary tool to keep the peace, to enforce galactic law." He voice grew stern and forceful. "And Princess, to give the systems complete control over their own politco-economic structures..." He shook his head. "No. I cannot agree with that. You are endorsing anarchy, Leia!"

"I don't think anarchy is quite the right word," Willard said. "But it would be a highly unstable system at best, a total catastrophe at worst. Princess, if you gut the Senate like that, it is highly possible that it will be impossible to maintain order in the systems."

"Let the systems maintain order on their own," Leia told him flatly. "Admiral Drayson, why do you feel that a standing army is necessary to keep the peace? Peace is already basically kept in a great many of the fringe worlds that the Republic and Empire alike ignored for hundreds of years."

"Don't muddle the issue, Leia," Drayson grunted. "The fringe worlds are one thing. We're talking about the entire galaxy here! It would be ridiculous to think that order can be maintained without at least a small army kept standing by."

Mon Mothma fixed him with her piercing gaze. "Admiral Drayson, what was your objection to allowing the systems to organize their own police forces? I voted for many proposals that outlined similar plans many times in the old Senate."

"My objection to it is that if the systems all keep separate armies to police themselves with, it would be far too easy for them to revolt. And if they did, how would the Senate defend itself? Under Princess Leia's plan, we would have no army of our own!"

"Indeed," Mon Mothma mumbled, turning to the princess. "And what is your reply to that?"

"I want Admiral Drayson to clarify his comment. What do you mean, 'how would the Senate defend itself?'"

Drayson shrugged. "Just what it sounds like I mean. The Senate wouldn't be able to defend itself at all. We would be powerless against any ill-trained rabble that a system's government could throw at us."

"So you're saying," Leia shot back, "that this rabble from a revolting system would physically attack the Senate?"

"No, what I mean is that-"

"You mean attack Coruscant," she filled in for him. "That is the current plan, isn't it? To move the capital back to Coruscant after we've retaken it from the Empire? So this rabble would be sending their army at Coruscant."

"That's right."

"So why couldn't Coruscant simply have their own local police take care of it?"

He was caught off-guard by that. "Do you mean to suggest that local police could defeat a professional army, Princess? I think that you-"

She interrupted him again. "Professional army?" she demanded. "Didn't you say that these men attacking us were 'ill-trained rabble?'"

"Well, yes, but..." He trailed off, scowling. "Princess Leia, what I don't think you quite understand is that..."

An hour later, the debate was still going strong.

--

Far away, in the Roulander system, a large space station orbited around the unsettled planet Haithren, a dull brownish globe with a foul, sulfurous atmosphere that was peppered by craters and volcanoes alike. The station wasn't spherical; rather, it simply resembled a very large command ship with a correspondingly large permanent or semi-permanent population. And correspondingly large weapons mounts. Aside from its size, though, there was little that was unusual about the station; myriad stations just like it were in just about every civilized system in the galaxy.

A meeting was taking place in one of the more ornately furnished rooms of the station. Five men were seated at a metallic gray table, round, dressed in crisp uniforms that would have made an onlooker realize that this was a military meeting. One of the men, aging but still robust, seemed to be in charge: he had a commanding presence and the others looked at him with respect bordering on reverence when he spoke. His dark eyes burned with an intense inner fire, and his chiseled features and short, thick gray beard gave him a singularly passionate and unyielding appearance.

He pushed a small red button on the underside of the table and a multisided hologram popped up in the center. It was a message, hastily transcribed, with an unmistakable electronic signature at the end.

"You all recognize that signature." His speech was blunt, and his deep baritone carried well enough that he had little need to speak loudly. He flicked the button again, and the hologram vanished without a trace. "General Eckras's mark. That means that Talkhana has given his explicit approval of this escapade."

The younger man to his right tapped his fingers on the metallic surface. His features were clouded. "So what you're saying, Commander Draegras, is that Lord Talkhana is stealing ships from his own fleet?"

Draegras scowled. "What I am saying is that Talkhana is stealing ships from the Free Confederacy and using them for his own ends. Ends which the council has _not_ approved and for which he has been known to act covertly to achieve."

"And what are you presuming that those ends are, Commander?" asked a lean, distinguished-looking old gentleman from across the table.

"You know as well as I that he plans to-"

The old man cut him off, not disrespectfully, but firmly. "I know what it is you are about to say, Commander, and may I remind you that accusing the Lord Talkhana could constitute treason?"

Commander-General Draegras shot him a sharp look. "You know me too well to think that I would make an unfounded accusation, General Palare."

A smile touched General Palare's thin lips. "I know you well enough to know that you sometimes speak before you think, Commander."

"Then you disagree with my assessment of Talkhana's plans?" There was a barely concealed edge in Draegras's voice.

Palare leaned forward. "Whether I agree with you or not is not the point. You are throwing around accusations with far too little evidence, Commander, regardless of how well-founded you personally may feel that they are. You say that General Eckras's mark on that document proves Lord Talkhana's involvement in this scheme, and while I'm inclined to agree with you, it would be impossible for us to prove in any court that Eckras and Talkhana are even connected in any way, let alone that they're plotting together."

A fat, balding, middle-aged man next to Palare nodded studiously. "I agree with General Palare. There simply isn't enough evidence of wrongdoing to accuse Lord Talkhana of anything. Certainly, it would be a simple matter to lock away General Eckras, but that would do precious little good and would harm us a great deal by turning Talkhana's wrath in our direction."

The younger man nodded towards the balding man. "General Kraley is right. Lord Talkhana is a very vindictive man. It would be an ill thing to arouse his anger."

Draegras's scowl deepened. "Do none of you have a spine? You sit there and speak of treason against Talkhana while I hold proof that Talkhana himself is engaged in treason!"

"No," General Kraley rumbled, calling up the hologram again and gesturing to the signature at the bottom, "you hold proof that Eckras is engaged in treason. As much as any of us wish it was so, we cannot connect this to Talkhana in any way whatsoever."

Draegras snorted. "So we're going to let him slip through our fingers once more." He looked disgustedly at the men around the table. "Talkhana has unilaterally commanded three of our finest pilots to attack a completely innocent cargo freighter, to fly to their deaths in an insane attack against the Alliance's fleet on Endor, and we are going to sit here and let him slip through our fingers."

Palare shook his head sadly. "It is not our letting him slip through our fingers, Draegras. Talkhana was far out of our grasp to begin with."

Commander-General Draegras, clearly about to let his anger get the better of him, stood up abruptly and stalked from the room. The others watched him go with a mixture of regret and relief.

--

Han Solo grinned at her. "Somehow, the image of you as a Jedi knight doesn't sit quite right with me."

Leia looped the belt around her thin waist. "You neither, huh?" Her outfit was a bit different from her usual mode of dress: a nondescript yellowish-tan tunic that reached three-fourths of the way down to her knees, loose white pants tucked into supple calf-high boots, and a seamless black band belt. She stared at herself appraisingly in the full-length mirror opposite her. It was certainly much _plainer_ than she was used to. "How do I look?"

"Oh, absolutely ravishing, your highness." Far from being the derisive term that Han has previously mocked her with, it had become a term of endearment, and he said it without a trace of a biting sarcasm that he once had. The only sarcasm in his voice was good-natured and loving.

She stared at herself a moment longer. "I look like a farm girl."

"Would you really want to muss your royal robes, your grace?" Han's grin stayed in place.

She smiled. "I couldn't care less about my royal robes. But this provides much easier movement, don't you agree?"

He looked her over. "I couldn't say. I've never worn royal robes before."

"Well, whatever they are, I'm sure these 'royal robes' are highly overrated in any case."

Han chuckled. "And surely not anywhere near as sexy as what you're wearing."

Leia sighed. "In any case, for whatever reason, Luke insisted that I wear this. I guess he knows best in this case, but..."

He grinned again, sitting up on their shared bed in the chamber. "No doubt the royal robes would have stopped you from using the Force."

"Yeah, well, I'm going to need all the Force I can get. I can't imagine how Luke's going to go about teaching this."

"Getting paranoid, your highness?"

She sighed. "You better believe it. Well, wish me luck."

--

In spite of months of preparatory work, Luke didn't have a very solid idea of how he was going to go about teaching it, either. Obi-Wan Kenobi had instructed him, certainly, as had Yoda, but neither experience had left him with anything like a firm guideline about what and what not to do. The fact that the majority of the work had to come from within, from the student's own will, did not make it any easier.

The large room where the class was taught was strictly utilitarian: dull gray concrete walls, floors made with cheap wood from the plentiful forests of Endor, fluorescent tubing overhead, and a wooden crate on the far side. Not an adornment or trace of a quirk showed anywhere, though he assumed it would gain plenty of those quickly enough. But for now, it was as blank a slate as the students minds that he hoped to fill with knowledge of the Force. Thinking of blank slates made him realize just how clueless he was about instructing this class.

So Luke Skywalker stood in front of the assembled eager-eyed students and decided to wing it.

"When you gain a certain amount of mastery over the Force," he began, launching right into the meat of the lesson since he knew that all the students were familiar with the basic concept of the Force, "you gain the ability to sense the Force in others. All sentient beings have the Force in them to some extent or another, and most can learn to control it to a certain degree with proper training. In case any of you are wondering," he added, "I haven't screened this class for potential with the Force or anything like that. Anyone who expressed interest was allowed to come." He glanced around the room. "To be honest, I'm a little disappointed. I'd expected that more people would be interested."

"There's still a kind of taboo about it all," offered a rugged-looking mid-twenties man in the front row whose most striking feature were his sharp, perceptive steel-gray eyes that made him look a good deal older than he truly was. His voice was deep, with a slight rasping sound in it. Luke recalled hearing him referred to as Soar. "I'd wager that more and more people join this class as time goes by."

"But we're the ones with the guts," a cheerful brown-eyed young man named Jeikar spoke up, grinning. He looked to be about sixteen, maybe seventeen. "So teach us all the deep Jedi-master secrets." Several people standing around him flashed a grin his way.

Luke coughed. "Well, that's actually part of the problem. You see, I've never taught anybody how to use the Force before, so I have very little idea how to even begin, let alone teach you any 'deep Jedi-master secrets.'" He paused, then added, "Besides, I'm going to hoard all those for use when any of you misbehave."

There was scattered laughter, which helped lighten his mood somewhat. He also saw Leia in the middle row, smiling at him. He smiled back.

"So," Luke resumed, "since I basically have no clue what I'm doing, I just threw together a rough plan for training you lot, which begins with lightsaber practice." Several of the younger students looked thrilled at the prospect of getting one of the weapons. "Not that that's definitely the best place to start, but it's where _I_ started, so I figured I'd try it and see how it worked out." He pointed towards the back of the room, behind the fifteen or so students. "There's a crate with the lightsabers. Help yourselves."

"Wait a second," Jeikar objected. "How can we use a lightsaber if we can't control the Force yet?"

"What do you mean?" Luke asked, confused.

Soar, whose long-legged stride had gotten him to the crate first, flipped one of the hilts over in his hand, then smiled slightly. "There's a switch," he informed Jeikar dryly, understanding his objection. A brilliant green energy blade lanced out of the silvery hilt, humming softly.

"Oh, yes," Luke said, embarrassed. "The lightsabers aren't activated by the Force. There's a little switch on the hilt that you flip to extend the blade."

The rest of the students, including an equally embarrassed Jeikar, retrieved sabers from the crate, grinning and murmuring excitedly - and a bit nervously - amongst themselves as they switched on the blades and filled the air with the weapons' signature pulsating hum.

"Those are training sabers," Luke added with a grin, "so they won't lop off limbs, just sting a little."

Leia glanced over at Luke, and the twins grinned at one another. "Why," she remarked, gazing at the would-be Jedi knights, all thumbs as they twirled their lightsabers and attempted to look knightly, "doesn't that make me feel a lot better?"

--

Han glanced up at his fiance as she strode through the door of their chamber, dressed in her unadorned training clothes. "Well?" he asked, expectantly.

Leia cocked her head sideways at him. "Well?"

"Well, how was it?"

"Probably less fun than you had hauling those converters to that colony on Varista." She looked at him curiously. "Speaking of which, I'm surprised you're back so early. Didn't you say that the shipment would probably take about a day to clear with the local government there?"

He grinned. "I was wrong, thank God. It only took a little over an hour, and then I took off. I had planned to spend a little time there with Chewie cleaning up their casinos, but I just decided to come on back here instead."

She raised an eyebrow. "'Cleaning out their casinos?'" she repeated archly.

His grin grew broader. "You're looking at a galaxy-class gambler here, your royal highness."

She choked back laughter and went to change into more comfortable - and less sweaty - clothing. "Anyway," she said through the door to the washroom, "I think today went alright."

"That's pretty vague."

"It's kind of hard to be specific, considering I don't really know what I'm doing yet."

He chuckled. "Well, I don't want a point-by-point description of your day, but is Luke's teaching working? I'm curious."

She frowned. "I guess so. I'm not sure. I mean, I feel like I'm definitely learning something, but I'm not sure if it's Luke or it's me, somehow."

"So you can use the Force now?" He tried hard to keep to old sneer out of his voice, and didn't think he'd quite succeeded.

She paid it no heed. "Not really, but I can sense it. So I'm definitely getting something out of it."

"What? The Force?"

Leia came out of the washroom and slapped him lightly on the side of the head. "No, the training, fool."

Han stared at her for a moment, then started snickering.

"What?"

"It's nothing," he protested, lying on the bed, snickering until his sides hurt. "I just got this crazy image of you and a couple dozen clueless Jedi-wannabes with visors over your heads, attacking each other with lightsabers."

Leia hurrumphed.

--

As Luke had suspected, Leia progressed by far the fastest of the group. The other neophyte saber-wielders were all quite eager, and most all quite incompetent. Jeikar and several of the other teenage students would have hacked themselves into little pieces by the end of the day if the sabers had been real, full-powered weapons. As it was, they merely were mildly singed all over and several of them would have trouble sitting down for the next few days. Soar, who Luke knew to be an excellent pilot and superb marksman with a blaster, turned out to be an only mediocre swordsman, and Luke could tell that his potential to control the Force, in spite of the strong will that Luke knew to be present, was meager at best. A middle-aged woman named Iris Astridia, handsome rather than pretty, was among the highest of the potentials that he could sense in the group; with diligent practice, he felt sure that the strong-willed, driven woman would make a fine Jedi. Aside from Leia, the person who he felt had the strongest natural ability with the Force was Sabrul Mantier, an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a fiery-eyed disposition that belied his advancing age. He also learned fairly quickly, and within a few days had gotten down the rudiments of saber-fighting, putting him a long leap ahead of the majority of the students.

Soar had been right about attendance: with each passing day, as Luke made it clear that the class was always open for anyone who wanted to join, more and more students showed themselves, overcoming their timidity and asking him for training. He wondered that if soon he would have to close off the class to newcomers, lest it become too large for him to instruct all the trainees at one time. And although he certainly appreciated the fact that a great number of people were interested in becoming Jedi, he hadn't intended for this to be a permanent career as a teacher by any means for him. He wasn't about to cut off a group of would-be students, but...

Perhaps when some of the students became skilled enough, adept enough in the ways of the Force, he could entrust the class to one of them. That was still a long way off, to be sure, though.

Or maybe it wasn't, at least in the case of his twin sister. He wondered if she might even have more potential than he did; though she was still a novice, her presence was like a tower amongst anthills in his senses, and she learned amazingly quickly. Sabrul Mantier, as quick, tough, and savvy as he was, was no match for the short, slender woman in combat - he was better at swordplay (in fact, Luke judged that he was the best swordsman of the entire lot) by a slim margin, but Leia, with only token guidance from Luke, had began to use the Force as an effective battle tool. Though her skills were still rudimentary, she had already been able to use the Force to create small, invisible bursts of kinetic energy. When she had time to focus, she could hit hard enough with it to make even a big man like Mantier stagger backwards. While Luke was impressed at her learning rate, it alarmed him that she was able to do so much with so little instruction. The point of the exercises that he had devised was to determine whether or not the student had significant potential to control the Force, and to teach them to use their lightsabers. The fact that Leia was already teaching herself to use the Force as a weapon...

Luke frowned. _Yoda said that fear, anger, and aggression led to the dark side. Does that mean that Leia using the Force aggressively will take her to the dark side?_

He puzzled over that for several long minutes, wishing that he had Kenobi or Yoda here to help him train the students, wondering if the class had been such a good idea after all. As he was the last of the Jedi, he certainly felt the need for continuance, to pass his skills on to others, but...

He sighed. Ben Kenobi had stopped appearing to him after he had seen the vision of him standing with Anakin Skywalker and Yoda at the festival in the village of the Ewoks. He had no idea whether that was because Ben saw no need to speak to him, or because he _couldn't_ speak to him, but he suspected that it was the latter. More than once he'd been in need of guidance, and there had been no ghostly image of Ben nor anyone else to help him.

So he perservered on alone, hoping that he was making the right choices. Back when he'd been back in training under Yoda, he'd had this idea that being a Jedi somehow imbued a person with a certain clairvoyance, a mystical ability to know which route to take, what to do next. But he found that he was little wiser than before, so he was on his own, without magical aid, helping the Alliance to decide on issues ranging from where the new capital should be located to the selection of new technologies to be installed on the Guardian Fleets, as was the current name for the galactic peacekeeping forces. The Guardian Fleets hadn't actually been deployed yet, and, in fact, Luke was generally opposed to their existence; it seemed to him that a centralized police fleet stank of the Empire they'd deposed. The fact that the currently favored plan was to put the new capital on Coruscant, the same planet that the Emperor had made his headquarters, did not make him feel any better about the notion. Coruscant was favored because it had been the capital of the Old Republic, not because of the Empire, but still...

Thinking of the Empire made him think again of the dark side. And Leia. He wondered if it might be best if specifically instructed her not to use the Force as a direct attack weapon, as a tool of her aggression. That was certainly not how Yoda had taught him: rather, Yoda had trained his abilities by having him lift boulders and so forth the Force. And he knew that it was safe to use the Force to augment abilities, such as jumping, but he wasn't sure whether it was safe to use it to augment strength to attack an opponent. And did it matter who the opponent was? Was it worse to use it in training, where the opponent would not be injured, or in real battle, where death was a likely outcome but the opponent was a vicious killer? Did the opponent have to be a vicious killer in truth or only one in the user's mind? What if the user was wrong? Did that make it worse still, because an innocent had been killed? Or did it not matter, because being drawn to the dark side was a strictly mental process? Or was there some objective scale, a definite division between the light and dark sides, and intent was irrelevant?

His head spinning with these questions and many others, Luke strode from the training room, alone. Answers were elusive, and gray areas were many, but he did firmly decide that he would instruct Leia to cease using the Force to directly attack her opponent.

--

Kail stared at him, stunned. "What do you mean, they refused?"

Draegras slumped down into the hardbacked chair in his office. "That's what I said. The craven fools were afraid we couldn't prove it."

"But the document-"

"Doesn't constitute proof, at least according to Palare and the rest of the spineless cowards."

Kail was flabbergasted. "Of course it constitutes proof! Everyone knows that Eckras doesn't do a damned thing without Talkhara ordering him to!"

"That's what I said. Palare even said he agreed with me, but none of them think that we could prove it in court." He snorted derisively.

Kail considered that. "I think we could, though."

"So do I. But _they_ don't, and I wasn't able to convince them."

"So we're going to do nothing."

Draegras sighed. "Looks that way."

Kail shook his head, angry. "That's ridiculous! Three of the Confederacy's best pilots, sent to their death, and we sit by and do nothing."

"I didn't say I supported it, Kail. But what can just the two of us do? If only we come out with this, we're dead men and you know it."

Kail didn't have anything to say to that. He stood in sullen silence, staring darkly at the wall.

After several long moments, he growled, "We have to do something, Draegras."

"I agree. But at the same time, I'm afraid we're stuck, Kail. We _can't_ do anything."

Kail's eyes turned toward him. They burned with a dark anger.

Reluctantly, Draegras finished his statement: "Kail, we're going to have to wait until another opportunity arises."

"And what if we're not able to prove it in court next time?" Kail demanded peevishly, gnashing his teeth. "What if _they_ say we're not able to prove it in court and we're mired in the mud again, only this time Talkhana finds out about it and orders us to death? Would you still sit here on your sorry ass, saying that we'll 'just have to wait until another opportunity arises?' What if Talkhana's found out about it _this_ time, and is drafting our execution notices right now? Ever think about _that_, Commander-General Draegras? What if we sit here and do nothing, and Talkhana fucking kills us?"

Draegras scowled deeply at that. "Enough, Kail!" he ordered in a deep, sharp tone, standing. "Do not forget that I am your commanding officer! I will _not_ have you standing there insulting me and swearing at me! Do you understand me, _Colonel_?"

Kail's face flushed, but the dark anger in his eyes did not abate. "Of course, Commander-General. I apologize for my insubordination."

Wondering if there was a trace of bitter sarcasm in Kail's voice, Draegras sighed and nodded. "Apology accepted, of course."

Before he could say another word, Kail had marched stiffly out the door, taut and furious.

Colonel Kail Stark was a tall, dark-haired man approaching his fortieth year, thin but with a wiry strength not at all evident when he wore his uniform. His brown-black hair had been hacked off short and unfashionably, and his features were not particularly fine or handsome. His eyes, though, dark and deep, had a truly intense cast to them, and made many of the men he commanded wonder if he was some kind of fanatic. And in a very real way, Kail _was_ a fanatic.

He had been born on an impoverished world in the Kholac system, Saldrah, a world which was a hotbed of political radicalism and thus under very rigid imperial control. Few freedoms were permitted to the people, which created more political unrest, which brought more draconian controls down on the planet. It was a vicious circle which he had despaired of ever escaping, especially after his father and older brother Jakren were killed in a riot when he was eleven years old. When his mother succumbed to a plague the following year, he had left his home for the streets, where the law of the jungle ruled: the strong survived. The weak died. His excellent blaster aim had saved him more than once during those years, but even it wouldn't have been enough to save him once he'd gotten on the wrong side of one of the powerful gang lords of the city. Faced with almost certain death, he opted to do something that he'd promised himself so many times he'd never do: he enlisted in the imperial army, and became a stormtrooper for the Empire.

He remained a stormtrooper for only a short time, however. Once he'd received orders to go with his unit to retrieve an R2 droid on a distant world called Tatooine, he'd traveled about half the way with the other stormtroopers, then hijacked a TIE fighter and rocketed to the nearby planet Commenor before anyone even realized that he was gone. By the time the imperial army had navigated through its internal bureaucracy and sent a squad to track him down, he had hired a private cargo freighter and was long gone, on a planet called Alderaan, where he'd, completely by chance, come in contact with the Rebellion in one of the bars in the capital city, in the form of a patriotic idealist named Biggs Darklighter. Kail's hatred for the Empire driving him, he'd joined the Rebellion as a fighter pilot and fought for them until the day they'd dealt the Empire its crippling blow against the reconstructed Death Star and killed the Emperor. But when it became clear to him that the politicians within the Alliance were hell-bent on denying freedom to the systems under their dominion, he'd resigned from his post, hired a passenger craft, and flown to one of the outer worlds of the Roulander system. Roulander was a populous trade center with sixteen worlds, fourteen of them inhabited, surrounding the solitary star, and he'd heard rumors of a group calling themselves the Free Confederates who wanted to revolt against the Alliance. And their goals did truly seem to match his lofty ideals, the ideals that made him out to be fanatical to many people. One of his most passionate ideals was to abolish or completely minimalize the central government that had caused him so much pain; another was to completely free the myriad systems to govern themselves as they saw fit, and to remove the trade barriers and economic sanctions that had kept his homeworld in Kholac and worlds like it trapped in poverty. Once he realized that the Alliance would do very little to accomplish these goals, he joined the Confederates as an officer, and his numerous skills had gotten him promoted to Colonel already.

But...now _this_!

He scowled as he made his way down the hall, his lithe, long-legged stride carrying him quickly. He had known that there were undesirable elements within the Confederacy, and one of them was the self-styled 'Lord' Talkhana, a vicious, corrupt, ambitious man who Kail considered to be as bad as any ever were in the Empire. The horrible part of it was that Talkhana had managed to take control of the Confederates, and Kail was all too aware of why: too many of the young, naive ideologues, many of whom had only half a clue about what they were supposed to be fighting for, felt that the charismatic Talkhana, an impassionate speaker with an inspiring voice, seemed the perfect man to rally around and lead them to freedom. He was not, though, as Kail quickly discovered, and he just as quickly discovered that there was a counter-movement within the Confederacy to depose Talkhana, labeling themselves the True Free, headed by Commander-General Draegras, Talkhana's third-in-command. Draegras had managed to intercept a copy of the order that General Eckras, one of Talkhana's toadies, had issued, ordering three of their best pilots to fly to Endor - _Endor_, the center of the Alliance's power! - and capture a freighter that had done no offense to lure the Alliance's defensive fleets to them. It had worked, obviously, and the three pilots had been almost instantly destroyed upon coming in contact with the Alliance's ships. He doubted whether they'd even managed to bring down a single craft from the opposition.

But they'd finally had proof of Talkhana's corruption in the form of the order. It was well-known that Eckras was a boot-licking coward who did absolutely nothing unless ordered to, either explicitly or by strong insinuation, by Talkhana himself. The order to send the pilots to Endor _should_ have been enough to bring Talkhana down, or at least cast powerful suspicions on him, for although Talkhana was generally considered the Confederacy's leader, he was strictly forbidden to act unilaterally, without first consulting the war council.

And the leaders of the True Free were now afraid to act, worried that they would be unable to prove the link between Eckras and Talkhana in court.

It was an absurd objection, and Kail knew that the True Free leaders had to know it. Virtually all the officers in the Confederacy were aware that Eckras did nothing on his own initiative (many of them because they were bitter that the boot-licker got a promotion to General instead of them), and it would have been a small matter to get any number of them to testify in court that this was the case. Not that it would have even been necessary. Talkhana was aware that most people knew about Eckras, so he possibly would not even have contested the charge. They might have been able to bring down the would-be tyrant without so much as a fight!

But now Draegras, too, was afraid to act. Kail knew that it was important for him to have the other leaders on his side, but to flatly refuse to act...

He stormed into his own quarters, shut the door, and made sure there were no observing cameras anywhere nearby. Action had to be taken, and if Draegras refused to act, he would have to do this on his own.

--

In the soft gray glow before daybreak on Endor, Luke sat, troubled, deep in thought. Something Yoda had told him back during his long days of training on Dagobah reverberated over and over through his mind.

"A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense," the diminutive old Master had said in his hoarse croak as he rode on Luke's shoulders through the dense jungles of that world. "Never for attack."

The phrase had suddenly struck him the previous night, and he hadn't allowed himself a moment's peace since. He wracked his mind, his clouded memories, trying to think of anything more specific Yoda had said, but his mind was blank. Anger, fear, and aggression Yoda had said to avoid, as they led to the dark side, but that was vague enough to lead to almost any interpretation that Luke wanted, depending on what angle he approached it from. He didn't feel as if his method of training would anger the students any more than Yoda's endless treks through the jungles, tortuous exercises, and endless cryptic advice had angered him. Aggression...perhaps training with lightsabers was not the best way to avoid this error, but he had told the students to try to enhance their abilities with the force: that was the entire point of the exercise, aside, of course, from learning the proper way to handle a Jedi's signature weapon. He felt that this was a better way to do it - certainly a more _interesting_ way to do it - than having them all stand on their heads for endless hours at a time, trying to lift rocks and droids and X-wing starcrafts, or whatever happened to be nearby.

But when he remembered Yoda saying 'attack'...to him, that carried far different, more specific connotations than 'aggression' did. If using the Force as a method of attack led to the dark side, he realized that he could have already inadvertently started some of his pupils on the way to the darkness by instructing them to use the Force in whatever way they could to increase their battle prowess. He'd felt that there was something wrong with saying so at the time, but it wasn't until last night that he'd realized _why_: not only was the Force not to be used for attack, Yoda had specifically said that it was _only_ to be used for knowledge and defense. That seemed to invalidate his feeling that using the Force to indirectly attack by making the student faster or stronger was alright.

But...

He sighed, staring at what little of the horizon he could see through the thickly wooded landscape.

If it was evil to use the Force as an indirect agent of attack, why had it been safe for him to do so against Darth Vader? Because Vader had been evil? Or because Vader had been using the dark side of the Force? Or _hadn't_ it been safe for him to use the Force against him? He certainly hadn't felt anything like what he imagined the dark side would feel like after any of his battles with his father, but then, how _would_ he know? He had no idea what the dark side felt like, if the dark side even felt any different from the good side of the Force.

_Hell,_ he mused sardonically, _I could have been using the dark side ever since I fought Vader. I don't have any idea how to tell it apart._

That thought did little to allay his worries, and he stared, unblinking, at the slowly rising sun, realizing that he had come no closer to any answers than he had been the previous day.

He remained there, seated, troubled, for many more hours that morning.

--

After four days, Aurens had finally gathered up the courage to ask Luke Skywalker the Jedi Master for training.

It hadn't been a quick or an easy decision for her. Her first exposure to the Force was when she'd heard about Darth Vader using it from her friends, and how he used it to further his evil ends, choke people, stop hearts, and from rumors of the evil powers of the Emperor, and how he ruthlessly crushed anyone who got in his way singlehandedly with use of the black magic called the 'Force.' She'd also heard of the old order of the Jedi, of course, but it was a vague memory, and it definitely wasn't what popped to mind when she thought of the Force. So it was hard for her to accept that Skywalker had simply set up shop and offered to teach the ways of the Force to anyone who was interested.

She _wanted_ to accept it, though. And she wanted to learn it. She was beginning to realize what a tremendous help she could be to people if she knew how to use it constructively.

_And,_, she thought, grinning a little mischieviously, _it would no doubt be handy as a self-defense tool, as well._

Not that she would likely ever have to use it for that. She, along with most of the other inhabitants of Endor, carried a sidearm pretty much everywhere out of long habit as much as out of any real need for one. But today she had left it in her quarters as she sought out Skywalker.

She finally found him in a long corridor leading to the designated training room, where he gave his daily lessons, and explained breathlessly to him what she wanted.

He smiled at her. He was boyishly handsome, and had a cute smile. "Sure, come with me. Class's open to everybody, and we get more students each day."

"I had a hard time convincing myself to come," she admitted, walking alongside him.

He nodded. "You're not the first to tell me that. Don't worry, it's only the fifth day. No one learns to control the Force _that_ quickly, so you won't be that far behind. And if you need a hand, one of the other students will be more than happy to show off his newfound prowess, I'm sure." He grinned dryly.

"I'm a fast learner."

"Good. You should do well, then." Before they reached the entrance to the training room, he turned to look at her. "What's your name?" he inquired politely.

She smiled. "Aurens. Aurens Locke."

Aurens watched as Skywalker stood at the front of the assembled students - numbering nearly forty, now - and gave a short introductory speech to the newcomers. She was a little comforted by the fact that there was eight other newcomers in addition to herself.

"No one," Master Skywalker, as she was beginning to think of him as, was saying, "can become proficient with the Force without long, arduous training. It is _not_ an easy road, in case any of you were harboring delusions of becoming Jedi masters within the hour." Scattered chuckles. "Come to think of it, _I'm_ not a Jedi 'master' yet, and look how long I've been doing it."

"How long _have_ you been doing it?" one of the other newcomers asked curiously.

Skywalker sighed. "The longest of any man alive, now. Not long at all compared to what Jedi are supposed to have gone through," a troubled flicker passed over his handsome features, then vanished in a blink, "but it's going to have to do, because until some of you begin to become skilled, I'm all that's left." He paused. "So, as I was saying, this takes a long time to master. That's why today, all of you will still be practicing with the lightsabers. For the newcomers that don't know, the sabers are in that crate behind you. You don't get to keep them." He grinned. "So don't let me catch you running off with one or I'll unleash the Force on you."

Stunned silence.

Master Skywalker gave a belated sigh. "It was a joke, people. Jedi are allowed to make jokes, too."

A few embarrassed laughs followed, then the trainees all retrieved their sabers from the crate in the back. Aurens looked at hers curiously, before hearing Skywalker mention that they were activated with a switch, not the Force. It was really quite a beautiful weapon, and it gave off a pleasant humming sound. She flipped her wrist experimentally, finding that it was light as a feather. She had somehow pictured the weapon being heavy, but realized that the energy blade obviously wouldn't weigh anything, which would explain how Skywalker was able to swing the weapon so quickly. She flipped it about a few more times, deciding that she liked the feel of it.

"Would you care to be my sparring partner?" a voice from behind her asked. She turned around to see a grinning teenager standing there, saber at the ready. She was fairly tall for a woman, but he was still a good six inches taller, and he had long, muscular arms. Definitely a reach advantage.

Well, a newcomer was expected to lose, right? And it would be good practice to fight a bigger opponent.

"Sure," she agreed, grinning back at him. "Go easy, yeah? I'm new."

They squared off, and immediately he came at her, flailing away with the humming energy weapon. He obviously thought he had some skill, but he moved awkwardly with the saber; she had seen Master Skywalker use it properly, and the lightsaber was almost like an extension of his arm. While she was observing him, he landed a hit on her shoulder. It stung.

"You okay?" he asked, lowering his weapon.

She nodded. "Fine. Sorry, was just a little distracted. I'm ready now."

And she was. When he charged her again, she easily parried his attack with a short sideways jerk of the saber, holding it vertically, then spun the weapon to twist his arm and lock it in place. She pivoted and grabbed hold of his wrist with her free left hand and before he knew what was happening, she used her torque to bash her saber against the right side of his neck in a blow that would have decapitated him if the sabers had been real. As it was, he merely received a particularly unpleasant shock.

She lowered her weapon and backed up for another go. "Ready?" she inquired.

"'course I'm ready," he mumbled, looking a little miffed about being beaten not only by a woman, but by one who was obviously shorter and weaker than he was. And a newcomer, at that.

She attacked, this time, hop-stepping forward with her right leg in front and feinting low, then, when he parried, sliding her saber up his to send a small shock through the metal hilt into his hand. He tried to recover with a vicious backhand slash, but she flipped the saber easily and knocked it aside, then pivoted and lunged forward, arm in front of her rigid and L-shaped, catching him right in his unguarded ribcage. Slightly unbalanced by his attack, the lunge sent him completely off his feet. He crashed to the floor, and she hop-stepped forward again, holding her saber to his throat. She smiled at him.

"Are you really a newcomer?" he demanded, clambering to his feet, irritated. "I've been here since day one, and you just completely trashed me."

"I guess I've just got a knack for it," she responded, grinning.

"I guess so," Master Skywalker, who had been standing wordlessly nearby, watching them spar, commented. "I'd prefer that you switched partners, however. Neither of you is learning very much from this."

The young man's face flushed in embarrassment. "Master Skywalker," he protested, "it's alright. I can hold my own."

Skywalker glanced at him. "It looked like she completely outclassed you a moment ago, Vastiar."

"But I've been practicing so hard, sir," he said truthfully. "Maybe it's beginner's luck."

"I don't know about that," Master Skywalker muttered. "I don't remember having much luck when _I_ was a beginner. But if you want another go at it, by all means, be my guest. I just didn't want you two to be unmatched. It doesn't do either of you any good."

Vastiar, now aware that Master Skywalker's eyes were on him, focused a lot harder on his attack, lashing out with four rapid strikes to her torso and legs. She effortlessly deflected the first three, but the fourth came in from a tricky angle and nearly landed. She blocked it at the last second, but it put her in a bad position, and he was quick to capitalize on that, moving forward quickly and attempting to sweep her legs out from under her with his right leg. He only caught her leading leg, but lucked into being in the position to use his torque to bring his lightsaber down across her sternum, knocking her backwards and to the floor. She landed on her back, rolled, then came at him, her movements swift and furious. He was able to block the first two, but quickly succumbed to the hail of strikes she delivered and was beaten to the ground.

Skywalker smiled slightly. "I guess I was wrong. She's better," Vastiar flinched as he said that, "but you're holding your own, I suppose. Forget I said anything."

They soon did, caught up in the intricate dance of their swordplay.

--

Sabrul Mantier's weapon flashed as he jerked his arm about in seemingly random attacks, and Leia's saber met each blow smoothly, refusing to give any ground to the old man. She knew that although his slashing about appeared random, all his attacks were carefully calculated, and his apparent jerky, awkward handling of the lightsaber was the result of the elaborate feinting and misdirection that he so effortlessly employed. He was, she knew, far and away the best swordsman of the students, due, in addition to his keen battle savvy, in large part to his size. He was a very large man: not a largeness of flesh, but rather of powerful, rock-hard muscles, thick bone, and ropy tendon. His long, thickly-muscled arms gave him what Leia considered to be a very annoying reach advantage.

But he was not perfect, and when she sensed that he had overextended a vicious overhand swipe slightly, she brought her saber down on his with all her strength, and, as he staggered slightly, lashed out at him with a barrage of rapid strikes. He recovered just in time, though, and although he gave up a little ground, her saber did not manage to touch him. And then, suddenly, he was coming at her again.

She knocked his first two strikes aside, kicked him slightly off-balance with her right leg, and focused hard on his barrel-like chest, her muscles tensing. A burst of invisible energy, like a fist made of air, bashed him in the upper torso, eliciting a sharp cough of pain from the big man. Before he could recover, she focused again, harder, and landed a heavy blow to his abdomen. He stumbled backwards, the wind knocked out of him, and she quickly capitalized on his weakness, leaping forward and hammering mercilessly at his defenses with her lightsaber. He attempted to turn the tables on her again, but he was too far off-balance, and she caught his attack easily, maneuvering swiftly to one side and pummelling him with multiple body blows from her saber.

Mantier grimaced angrily, pivoting suddenly as he seemed to fall, and tried to sweep her, but she saw it coming. She hooked his leg in the backside of her knee, moving with the attack, then elbowed him sharply in the lower back. As he grunted in pain, she released his leg and, as he tried to spin and gain his feet, smashed him hard in the chest with the butt of her lightsaber, sending him reeling to the floor.

She strode forward to put her saber to his throat and force him to concede the match, but he still had some fight left in him. He scissored her legs as she approached, knocking her to the ground, followed up by a massive strike with his saber that sizzled painfully on her back. Ignoring the pain, she flipped over, concentrating furiously, barraging him with a hail of invisible fists. He anticipated some of them, barely managing to get out of the way, but took the brunt of the attacks, forcing him to lower his guard as he backed up, scowling deeply. Leia lunged to her feet straight at him, landing a well-placed shot to his right ribcage, followed by a slash to his legs that he parried, flipping her weapon aside. She stumbled slightly, and he launched into another offensive, a tricky five-step slash-and-kick attack that had nearly flattened her last time he'd executed it. This time, though, she was ready, and when the thrust kick followed the misdirectional upward slash, she spun lithely aside and brought her saber down on his leg, hard. His features betraying no surprise, he counterattacked instantly, spinning his torso quickly to avoid a follow-up diagonal slash, then pivoting, completing the spin, and snaking his arm forward, grabbing hold on her right underarm. He jerked his arm inward, pulling her forward at an awkward angle, but she reacted in time, twirling in the opposite direction and landing a powerful strike that would have removed his offending arm at the shoulder had the saber been real.

He backed off, his usually deadly serious features cracking into a rare smile. His dark, flinty eyes actually looked pleasant for a moment. "I concede the match," he told her gracefully. "That counter was excellent. I never expected it."

She grinned at him. "I know."

--

Luke stood in front of the assembled students as they were getting ready to be dismissed from class. He cleared his throat, and there was a tired look about his eyes; it was obvious that he'd not been resting well of late.

"I know," he began, his voice firm and strong, "that the majority of you can barely even sense the presence of the Force at this early stage in your training, let alone channel it for any constructive purpose. However, I am also aware that some of you are beginning to exert some rudimentary control over the Force," he glanced pointedly at Leia, Iris, then Sabrul Mantier, "so I feel that this needs to be said. All of you, I'm sure, know the basic idea of the Force, but what some of you may not know is that there is a 'dark side' to it. I know you all have places to be after this class, so I won't go into a long explanation of the dark side, but the gist of it is this: for all the good, constructive, useful things that can be done with the Force, there exists an equally powerful opportunity to use it for destruction. If your heart is in the right place, I have no doubt that you will not succumb to the dark side. Indeed, the temptation of it will be relatively minor for most of you. But for those of you who are tempted, remember this: fear, anger, aggression. These things are the paths that lead to the dark side, and once you start down the path to it, it will consume you." His blue-gray eyes were piercing and bright as he gazed around at the students. "The Force is _not_ to be used as an attack. That is extremely important. Use the Force to enhance your abilities in combat, but do not strike out with it, do not let your anger, your aggression use the Force as a tool for damage. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense. Remember that. Never for attack."

Soar's penetrating eyes found Luke's. He was blunt and to the point. "Then why train with weapons, Master Skywalker?"

Luke closed his eyes, sighed. "I feel that it helps to focus your mind, allow you to sense the Force better. If you possess the willpower to refrain from using the Force to attack, there will be no damage done by this training."

No one spoke, then, and Luke dismissed them all.

"Leia," he called out. She was among the last leaving.

She looked at him inquisitively.

"Come here," he told her, wondering how he was to phrase his request to her, to make it seem as though he was not suspicious of her. "I have something to tell you."

--

Sabrul Mantier drew Leia once more as an opponent the next day.

The older man, truth be told, liked sparring the short, pretty woman more than anyone else in the class. He was perfectly aware of his own prowess with a sword, and she was the only one who could regularly give him a good match. That other woman, Iris Astridia, could land strikes on him occasionally, but unless he held back, he found that he could defeat her with almost contemptuous ease.

But Princess Leia...she wasn't extraordinarily skilled with the lightsaber, as he was, but she had somehow managed to acquire a trick where she could hit her opponents with kinetic energy bursts, and she could hit _hard_ with them. They generally weren't enough to bring him down by themselves, but they threw him off balance at critical moments, allowing her to close on him and go on the offensive. In close quarters, she was a formidable opponent, moving quick as a snake and a good deal trickier. In addition to her being faster than him, he was not able to effectively extend his arms when she closed on him, so he had learned to let himself fall back with the energy bursts to keep her at a longer range.

Today, though. He was curious to see how today would turn out, since Master Skywalker had expressly forbidden them to use the Force as an attack (which is what he assumed the princess was doing, unless it was just some strange sleight-of-hand she'd picked up somewhere). A small part of him exulted that he would finally be the uncontested best fighter in the class, but he ignored it, knowing that he couldn't have cared less about being the 'best,' and truly wanting Leia to continue being a serious threat to him.

He nodded to her, and the match commenced.

His was the first attack, lunging forward quickly with a single powerful swipe that she easily knocked aside. Her next move was predictable: she darted in at him, attempting to close quarters with him. It didn't work. Knowing it was coming, he contemptuously parried her sidehand slash, then smashed his knee into her stomach as she spun to the side, a moment too slowly. He followed it up with several vicious cuts at her torso and thighs that she barely managed to hit aside, stumbling badly. Knowing he had her, he moved in for the kill, hitting her savagely in the left shoulder with his lightsaber, cutting her legs out from under her, then standing, triumphant, his saber to her throat.

She conceded the fight with a sigh. He sighed slightly, too, knowing that if the Master had not forbidden her to use her energy attacks, she would have been able to stop his relentless offensives. He didn't feel _right_ about the victory; it was like defeating a one-legged opponent.

"Again?" he inquired.

Leia nodded. "Again," she said. There was frustration in her voice.

In the following matches, the princess, try as she might, fared no better. He refused to insult her abilities by fighting with less than all of his skill, but each time he defeated her, instead of the heady rush of victory, he felt as frustrated as he knew that she must have.

When she left the training room that evening, her shoulders were slumped, and there was a sullen, angry look in her eyes.

--

Leia stood in her quarters, alone.

Two days past, Luke had taken her aside after the training session and told her that for her own good, she needed to stop channeling the Force into what he termed 'direct attacks.' He was much more specific and insistent than he had been with the general class, and she had done what he'd said the following day - today - and been rewarded by seeing a massive decrease in her own effectiveness in combat, going from being far and away the best fighter in the class to only mediocre. She was able with a lightsaber and learned quickly, but her shortness and lack of reach severely impaired her ability to fight big, fast, long-armed opponents like Sabrul Mantier, who was able to defeat her with ease now. Luke had said that it was probably okay to use the Force to augment her abilities, but she had not yet taught herself how to do that yet and when she said as much to him, he had shut up tighter than a clam, obviously hiding something from her. The most troubling thing was that she had no idea why he didn't want her exercising the abilities that she'd gained. Wasn't that, after all, the whole point of the class? Or did he fear, because she was stronger in the Force than anyone else he was training, that she had the greatest danger of falling to the dark side? It seemed to her that her strength in the Force would protect her from temptation, not make her vulnerable to it.

And the fact that he was not sharing everything he knew about it with her irked her to no end.

"Why in heaven's name would he be hiding things from me?" she wondered out loud, her thin brows knotting in thought.

Well, he had been successfully able to hide the fact that Darth Vader was his father from her, and hadn't seemed particularly guilty about it. And successfully hid that Darth Vader was also _her_ father, and that they were twins. Hiding things from her, it seemed, was as natural as breathing for him.

_No,_ she thought, scowling. _What kind of thinking is that? That's hardly fair to Luke...after all, he hid those things from me for my own good._

Still, she wished that he'd tell her why he didn't want her using the Force. As it was, she'd retreated away to her quarters for the evening to practice on her own; after he'd told her that she could only use the Force to augment her abilities, she'd resolve to just that.

Not that she had any idea how.

She decided that her biggest weakness was her shortness, and thus her lack of reach, so she focused on trying to increase her quickness, her lateral movement speed, so that she could move in quick enough that reach would no longer make a difference. In fact, she reflected, if she were fast enough, increased reach would actually be a disadvantage at close enough range.

Proceeding slowly, she tried to pull at the Force, draw it into her body, make her legs stronger and her movements more rapid.

_Force the Force to increase my force,_ she thought inanely, the strain on her mind mentally exhausting her.

After a minute or two, she stopped, slumping over, hands on her knees. She shook her head angrily; she hadn't felt a thing. The direct attacks, the kinetic energy bursts..._those_ had come perfectly naturally, and she'd learned them effortlessly. Obviously, this was going to be a greater ordeal for her.

She concentrated hard again, and again felt nothing except exhaustion, but forced herself to continue again, and again, and again.

Tired, alone, only her willpower keeping her going, she kept repeating it long into the night.

--

Leia arrived the following day in the training room with a singularly determined gleam in her eye, and partnered up with Iris Astridia for sparring. Iris, middle-aged with a square jaw and sky blue eyes, would have made quite a handsome man, Leia thought, but the features looked a bit out of place on a woman. Not that she wasn't attractive in her own right: taller than most of the men there, with lean, strong muscles and a quick swordarm, but a shapely figure all the same.

Iris nodded to Leia, signaling that she was ready to begin, and extended the blade of her training saber.

Leia did not focus on the swordplay; rather, she attempted to pull the Force into her, make her faster, more agile. Iris, as honorable a fighter as any, did not overly take advantage of Leia's distraction from the swords, but still gave her a jolt every now and then to warn her that she was not going to go easy on her, either. Leia, already sweating from the exertion, was steadily beaten backwards as she attempted to parry Iris's rapid-fire strikes, knowing with no small amount of frustration that the older woman was only fighting halfheartedly, yet she was still beating her.

_Draw on the Force,_ she told herself angrily, trying fruitlessly to make herself quicker and succeeding only in tiring herself out ahead of time. _Make it work for you. Feel the Force in your legs. The Force is in your legs. Fast, fast, move faster, make me faster..._

It didn't work. With a grandiose flourish, Iris swept her legs from under her, sending her unceremoniously to the floor on her rear end.

"Damn it," Leia muttered, pulling herself tiredly to her feet.

Iris raised a curious eyebrow at her, having never heard the shorter woman swear before. "You feeling okay, Leia?"

Leia sighed. "Fine, fine." She nodded at her partner, and the sparring commenced once again.

Luke watched his twin sister with puzzlement and worry. She was uncharacteristically sullen today, and her reflexes seemed to be slower, as well: he'd seen her hold her own easily against Iris before, but today, she was being soundly thrashed. And although she'd mentioned no troubles to him, he could sense that there was something wrong with her.

_Maybe she's sick, or just didn't sleep well,_ he reflected, watching Iris force her back into a corner effortlessly. But he privately doubted that that was the case, but he couldn't guess what the problem was.

_Why don't I just _ask_ her? _he mused, grinning to himself. _I must be really buying into my Jedi master image if I'm sitting here trying to psychically guess what everyone's problems are._

Leia thought she almost had it when a voice shattered her concentration.

"Leia?" Luke's concerned voice hovered over to her. "I noticed that you-"

"Shut _up_!" she snarled at him, frustrated beyond belief. "I almost had it, damn you!"

Luke stood there wordlessly, his mouth hanging open. He'd never heard his sister swear before, let alone swear at _him_. Iris also backed up a step, startled at her sudden vehemence. Several of the nearby students glanced at her, stopping their own sparring matches.

Leia looked instantly ashamed. "I...I'm sorry, Luke," she said sincerely, her face red. "It's just...you interrupted my focus when I was so close..."

He waved her apologies away, and the neighboring students resumed their training. "It's okay, don't worry about it. Look, I, uh, noticed that you've seemed a little troubled today. Like you're not able to keep your head in the fight. Are you okay?"

Leia sighed. "It's just, well, you remember how you told me to only use the Force to augment my abilities, not as a weapon by itself?"

He nodded.

"Well, I'm trying to do that. I just thought I had it right when you interrupted us."

He looked embarrassed. "Um...sorry?"

"It's okay. I'm just a little frustrated is all."

Somehow, both of them knew it was more than that.

--

The following day brought no relief for the frustrated Leia.

She knew that her opponent, a rugged, gray-eyed man in his mid-twenties named Soar, was a far inferior swordfighter to her, and yet she couldn't seem to penetrate his defenses, and he found holes in hers all too easily. The memory of yesterday, before Luke had interrupted her and Iris, haunted her, laughing at her, mocking how she could feel the Force but was powerless to mold it to her will.

"Perhaps you should rest," she heard Soar say to her, his large, callussed hand on her shoulder. "You do not seem well." He was a man of few words, but she found that for some reason, even those few words that he did speak were too many for her. She just wanted silence, silence to concentrate in. She knew, with concentration, she could gain the power that she lacked.

"I am well," she assured him shortly, brandishing her lightsaber's energy blade, wiping the sheen of sweat from her brow.

She nodded, and he obliged, coming at her, feinting twice, then landing a good hit on her left calf, followed by a powerful strike to her left underarm, then one to her ribs. She jumped backward, then launched her own attack, a rapid three-slash combination that Soar easily knocked aside. He caught the following lunge by giving with it and dragging his saber along hers, causing her to go off-balance slightly, then took his free hand and brought it down on her back, letting her know without actually doing so that he could have knocked her to the ground.

The following rounds went no better for her. Soar, obviously concerned for her and wondering if she was sick, fought with less than all his skill, yet he somehow managed to dominate her. It was as if the more she practiced, the less skilled she became.

_I could beat him, though, _she thought, pulling herself up from the ground once more. _All I'd need to do is use the Force as it comes naturally to me. Luke forbids it, but I could be strong if I just used the Force..._

She forced those thoughts down angrily. Luke would not have simply forbidden her from using the Force as a direct attack weapon without good reason. Even if he didn't disclose those reasons to her, she knew it would be unwise in the extreme to simply discount his considerable experience with the Force and ways to use and ways not to use it. Still, the thought lingered at the edge of her mind, pulling at her, tempting her. She felt sure that with practice, she could swiftly become very powerful using the Force in that manner.

_Power... _She scowled. _What am I thinking? Since when was power my motive? I don't care about power..._

So she forced down those thoughts, and concentrated on fighting her perpetual losing battles.

--

Night had already fallen, but Leia paid it no heed. Her lighting was off, in any case, as it had been all day, and her eyes were closed; the darkness made no difference to her, standing, focusing, concentrating, until she was in an almost hypnotic trance, mumbling something softly under her breath.

Her strong will tore and clawed at the Force that she knew was there, could feel, could sense, could almost _taste_, but could not coerce into her to make her stronger. Her hair was tied back into a messy, unkempt ponytail, far removed from the elaborate hairstyles she usually favored, and it looked badly in need of washing. Her skin was oily and covered with a layer of dusty sweat, garnered from grueling hours of standing still, trying with all her might to manipulate the Force, and having no success.

The Council had convened earlier in the evening, had asked her to be present. She'd refused, retreating instead to her chambers to train herself, to prove herself to...

_To what? _she wondered, her mind unbelievably tired but not willing to give up. _What, who am I trying to prove myself to? Luke? Myself?_

She didn't think either was correct. She certainly had never felt the need to prove herself to her brother or herself, but what did that leave?

She had no idea.

But the relentless drive was there, and she felt a compelling power urging her onward, to control the Force, to become stronger, to bent it to her will.

So here she stood, concentrating, focusing, reaching out with her mind.

--

Aurens was not able to attend class for the next three days.

She worked as a mechanic, generally doing repairs on the various fighter craft that the Alliance used, and one of her assistants had been unable to come to work due to illness. This left her with some misgivings towards the assistant, who she felt was unintentionally depriving her of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn something truly fascinating, but she tried to practice on her own with the saber in her quarters, but it wasn't the same as having a live opponent to spar with.

On the evening of the third day, she once again met with Vastiar, the young man who she'd sparred on the first day, this time in the bar that had been set up in one of the more oddly-shaped underground chambers. He was seated at a small wooden table, alone, drinking something that looked vaguely like whiskey. It was hard to tell, exactly; the lighting in the bar was miserable. The technicians swore that they'd have the lighting system working soon, but then, they'd been promising that for a month now, and she was becoming accustomed to drinking in the dimly-lit tavern.

"Hello again," she greeted him cheerily, sitting down across from him.

He smiled a bit wanly at her. "Good to see you again."

"How's your training going?" she asked politely, signaling to the bartender. He brought over a small glass of wine.

"It's going." His smile vanished, and she noticed that his features showed a somberness that she hadn't noticed when she's fought him. "That's about all that can be said for it."

"Not so good, then, huh?"

He shrugged, taking a sip from his drink. "As good as anything else, I guess."

She cocked her head at him, puzzled. "What's that supposed to mean?"

His smile was more than a trace bitter. "What do _you_ think it means, Locke?"

"I think you're pissed off about something," she said bluntly, wondering how he knew her surname. "And you sound like someone who's dumped his troubles on the world so he won't have to take blame for them."

He raised a curious eyebrow. "And how would you know that? Guy's drinking and says things aren't going so well, and you automatically assume that means that he's dumping his troubles on the world?"

"I'm right, though, aren't I?"

"No, you're not." He stared at her flatly, and she noted with surprise that he seemed largely sober. "I accept responsibility for my problems, and I think it's offensive that you'd assume that I wouldn't."

She shrugged. "Sorry. You just seem like the type."

"'The type?'" He laughed. "What's 'the type?' The whiny type? The weak type?" His humor vanished. "You're a better fighter than me, Locke, I'll readily admit that. But that does _not_ give you the right to sit there and judge me."

Aurens leaned back in her hard steel chair, and neither of them spoke for several long moments.

"How do you know my name?" she asked, finally, breaking the silence.

He chuckled. It was not a particularly pleasant sound. "Aurens Locke. It's on your I.D. tag." He nodded to the right breast pocket of her orange mechanic's jumpsuit, and she glanced at it briefly, embarrassed.

"You have no I.D. tag, Vastiar," she commented, attempting to bring a bit of pleasantness back into the conversation. "What's your name?"

"It's Vastiar."

"Just Vastiar?"

"Just Vastiar."

She nodded. "Vastiar, then, and just Vastiar. It's an unusual name."

He smiled fleetingly. "It should be. I chose it for that reason."

"Oh? How come?"

"Nothing too special," he responded, finishing off his liquor. "I guess I'm just a delusional individualist trying to keep a sense of myself in this assimilated galaxy."

"Assimilated?" Her voice betrayed her surprise.

His eyes met hers. "You don't think so?"

"Whatever I think, I'm curious to hear your thoughts, Vastiar."

He nodded. She noticed that, as he began to speak, his eyes became unnervingly sharp and penetrating. "We're losing our sense of identity, Aurens Locke. The vast frontier systems dwindle daily as we draw them into our mammoth civilization, and we...assimilate them. The Alliance and the Empire and the Old Republic before it are all galaxy-wide dominions, and a lot of people don't stop and think about what that means, what that means for the species and the worlds that fall under their control, don't stop and think about the _enormity_ of it all. When an imperial or a republican government on some far-away, half-imagined world posesses the power, the authority to command our actions, to control our destinies, we become assimilated into a larger whole, working for the fiction of the 'common good,' determined, of course, by the politicians or military men in charge."

"You don't believe in a common good?"

"I believe that there is such a thing, but that invocation of it by a government is evil. The common good exists, but how would a power-hungry politician know how best to achieve it? Why would they even _care_? Obviously they don't. They use the concept of it to corrupt billions of individual minds and wills into believing that they must work for _them_, the government, and thus we all fall prey to the system. Assimilated. The larger whole is an abomination."

She looked at him curiously. "You're a strange man to be fighting for the Alliance, then, Vastiar."

He smiled sardonically. "You know what they say. 'Strange times makes for strange bedfellows.' I felt that while the Alliance was far from good, it paled in comparison to the naked evil displayed by the Empire. The lesser of two evils, as it were."

"As it were? Not as it is?"

He nodded. "Now the Empire is all but destroyed; the greater of the evils has been vanquished."

"So what does that mean for you?" she inquired.

"That the remaining evil is still evil."

"You will fight against the Alliance, then? You won't even give it a chance?"

He was silent.

"And if you did fight, who would you fight beside? Would you fight alone?"

He sighed solemnly. "If it came to that, yes, I would. As I said, Locke, I'm an individualist. I do not need a group about me to make me bold. But you're right, the Alliance deserves a chance. Everyone deserves a chance, even the politicians."

She nodded slowly. "So what will you do now, Vastiar the individualist?"

"Train," he responded simply. "The Force fascinates me, and I believe that Luke Skywalker is one of the few truly good men alive today."

"And after that?"

"After that?" His eyes unfocused, and he stared off into the dimly lit bar. "Travel. Wander. Indeed, there is always new people to meet, books to read, and places to see. I think, I hope, that somewhere out there, in some yet undiscovered starfield, I can find freedom at last."

She silently gazed at him for a moment, then broached a subject she had been wondering about. "You're obviously older than you look. I've never heard a teenager say anything like that before."

"Then perhaps you should listen more closely when people speak, Aurens Locke." There was no hint of humor in his voice. "I am nineteen years old."

--

Again, Leia stood, alone, in her chambers. Her fiance, Han, had left for a couple weeks on a mission to one of the outlying systems, hauling a some kind of sensitive cargo or another.

Her eyes were closed, and perspiration soaked her training garb. She was scowling deeply, in the midst of intense concentration, focusing hard on the Force, on her own being, on merging the two.

Learning the ways of the Force was quickly becoming an obsession for her. She had begun to neglect her duties as a Councillor, preferring to spend all her time in her chambers or the training room, focusing, training, improving her skills with the saber, trying to increase her natural abilities with the Force.

_Speed, the speed, the speed,_ she whispered inside her mind, over and over and over, like a mantra, as if merely repeating the word would make her faster. Her beautiful visage was drawn and haggard from long hours standing in this one spot, eyes closed, never pausing for rest, focusing solely on the Force and using it to make her stronger, faster, more powerful. Yet she felt nothing, could sense that the Force was there but could not coax it inside of her, could not make it augment her speed, could not come as close to getting it as she had during the fight with Iris, when Luke had interrupted her, when Luke had taken the Force from her, when she had been so close, when Luke had jerked it all away from her, when Luke, when Luke...

She bellowed in fury, her eyes flaring open, burning with rage. She stretched her taut arms in front of her and let her anger free, letting its scorching essence sear through her, making her feel alive, feel powerful, feel in control, and the essence of her rage roared through her arms, like water, like fire, and she screamed as the power of her wrath lanced forward in a raging, swirling bolt of heat and flame.

Then her anger was gone, and she fell to her knees, spent, wondering, nearly unconscious. She noted detachedly that the blast had completely incinerated the bed and the dresser next to it, and automated fire extinguishers barely managed to kick in before the entire room was ablaze. A ghost of a smile touched her dry lips as she collapsed to the ground amidst the rapidly cooling wreckage of her chamber.

--

It was nearly midnight when Luke, deep in a conversation with his old comrade Wedge Antilles about battle tactics and the latest X-wing upgrades, suddenly sat straight up, his blue-gray eyes sharp and alarmed.

Wedge wordlessly raised a questioning eyebrow at him.

Luke closed his eyes. "I just felt a tremendous disturbance in the Force," he said softly. "But...it's gone now."

"That's probably a bad thing, right?" Wedge was accustomed to his Jedi friend doing and saying very odd things. "I've heard you say that before when a lot of people died."

Luke shook his head. "No...it wasn't like that. I guess it wasn't even a disturance, really, just more of a...a..." He grasped for the word.

His friend looked at him expectantly.

"More of a...oh, hell, I can't explain it," he muttered. "But I swear, just for a moment, it reminded me of...well, something I'd rather not be reminded of."

"That's pretty vague," Wedge commented. "What with all you've been through, I can think of about ten thousand things that meet that criteria."

Luke shook his head again. "Forget it. I'm sure it was nothing."

Wedge snorted. "'Forget it?' After all the weird predictions that you've made that have come true? Luke, my friend, you truly have the gift of introducing paranoia into my life."

Luke grinned. "Is that a bad thing? Maybe it'll make you a little less reckless when you fly."

"Maybe it'll make my hair fall out before I'm forty."

"Well, think of it this way: if you're a reckless flyer, you may not even live to be forty. Better bald than dead, right?"

"_There's_ a comforting thought." Wedge looked at him curiously. "So you're not going to...you know, inspect the Force or anything? Raise an alarm? Is Darth Vader back from the dead and standing right behind me?"

Luke didn't respond.

Wedge shot a quick glare behind him, just to be sure.

Luke sat silent for another few moments, then Wedge asked, "You alright, Luke? You looked a little, you know, spooked or something."

"I think I know what I felt," he murmured, troubled. He looked up at his longtime companion. "I'll be back, Wedge."

Wedge snorted again. "Famous last words. Hell with that, I'm going with you. You've piqued my curiosity."

Against his better judgment, Luke assented.

When they reached their destination, Luke was unarmed, but Wedge was nervously fingering the blaster at his side.

"Where is this?" Wedge whispered, not familiar with the area. "I don't recognize-"

"Ssh!" Luke cut him off. "It's Princess Leia's quarters. I think something's happened to her."

Wedge frowned. "You think she's been attacked?"

"I'm not sure."

"You know, I'd feel better all around about this if you were carrying your lightsaber."

Luke stared at the door, as if his eyes could pierce it and determine what was inside. "So would I," he admitted ruefully. "But I'm not going back for it."

Wedge also stared at the door. "Maybe we should go get the guards from the next hall," he suggested quietly.

They looked at each other.

"That would be a bad idea," they both said in unison, Wedge because it would hurt his pride, Luke because he honestly felt, instinctively, that it would be a bad idea.

"Well, here goes nothing," Wedge muttered, flipping his blaster out of its holster and very nearly vaporizing the door. He hopped through, alert and tense; Luke quickly followed him. Neither was quite prepared for what they saw.

Wedge looked around him, jaw slack. The entire room looked like it had been smashed by some giant, flaming hand: the bed was reduced to smoking splinters, the metal along the far wall was melted and seared, the dresser alongside the bed was completely incinerated and in several pieces around the chamber. Most of the plush carpeting had been reduced to nonexistence, and the metal floor underneath was twisted and malformed, as if by tremendous heat. The various decorations that had once adorned Leia's chambers had simply been vaporized.

And in the midst of it all lay an unconscious Princess Leia, haggard in appearance but unharmed by the fire.

"Um," Wedge commented intelligently. "Like, wow."

Luke was already at Leia's side, cradling her unconscious form in his arms. "Oh my God, Leia...oh my God..."

Wedge, regaining his senses, walked gingerly over to Luke. "Is...she going to be okay?" he asked, concerned. He was fond of the pretty, fiesty, good-hearted princess, as many of the pilots of the Alliance were.

Luke nodded, rocking her gently back and forth. "Yes. She doesn't seem harmed by the flames."

"How is that possible?" he asked wonderingly, staring once more at the blasted remains of the chamber.

Luke only shook his head in response.

--

Leia's absence in training the next day went virtually unnoticed. Luke's, however, was necessarily quite an issue for the suddenly masterless students.

While some of the students were obviously posessed of more inherent skill in either using a lightsaber or controlling the Force, none of them had progressed to a level where they felt confident enough in their abilities to be able to guide others. In truth, even Luke did not feel as if he'd reached that point, although he had not shared that sentiment with any of them.

Sabrul Mantier, generally held by the students to be the best aside from Master Skywalker himself, offered to try and lead the class, although he readily professed to be highly unsure of the wisdom of doing such and made it very clear that it might be smarter for the students to simply skip this session. Most elected not to, however, being fairly confident that the stern, fiery old man would not lead them astray.

He didn't.

The exercises he took the class through were as rigorous as when Master Skywalker did them himself, although the Master generally created one or two new ones every session. Mantier felt it would be folly to attempt to do so on his own.

"Have you seen Princess Leia?" Jeikar said in a low voice to the woman next to him, Iris.

Iris shook her head. "I think she's ill. She hasn't seemed quite as strong lately."

"The princess is ill?" a young man called Taren asked. "Will she be okay?"

Iris shrugged. "I don't even know for sure she's ill. But whatever it is, that little lady's pretty tough. I'm sure she'll be alright."

--

Wedge felt it wiser to keep his mouth shut about what he'd seen the previous day.

He, along with Scray, Jason, and four other X-wing pilots had been ordered to eliminate a band of revolters in the neighboring star system of Ariskandra. The higher-ups had branded the rebels under the broad umbrella term of 'imperial sympathizer,' but Wedge and his fellow pilots thought that this was something else, something new: an entirely new revolt, separate from either the Alliance or the disintegrating Empire.

Nevertheless, he had his orders, and it wasn't his job to determine who the rebels were, only to destroy them.

He wished that Rat, a good friend of his, hadn't been killed in the orbital fight against the strange, post-imperial craft. That was just pure bad luck: they'd had the drop on their opponents, they'd gone in, blasters roaring, they'd done everything right, but Rat just got unlucky and the third craft had managed to blast him before they could take care of it. He was thankful that Jason had been with them, or the craft might have been able to get a third shot off, and maybe it wouldn't have just grazed his starboard wing next time.

Wedge had learned in the days after the fight that the Empire had christened the crafts Platinum-K6's, purportedly because of the astronomical developing cost that they'd incurred. When he looked into the reason for the expenses, he found out that the Platinums had been developed specifically to test an experimental warp drive with the capability to lock on to a target and actually track it through hyperspace. There was no way to tell whether or not the modified versions they'd faced were equipped with the upgraded drive or not, but, analyzing the schematic, he found that Scray's description of a more powerful weapons system was grossly understating the fact. The Platinums had been installed with a stabilizer nearly four times as powerful as the original design called for, allowing them to remain level and virtually unaffected through tremendous pressure - or recoil. The schematic didn't give as detailed a readout of the weapons themselves as he'd hoped for, but it was enough for him to tell that they were a very complex form of rail gun, guns that used electromagnetic propulsion to throw a shell an unbelievable speeds. The way the ship's weapons had been modified, it seemed to be able to shoot rapid-fire, without recharging for several seconds as conventional rail guns did. In addition, it increased the power of the weapon exponentially, shooting the depleted uranium shell at roughly ninety-five percent of the speed of light, but also produced massive recoil, unlike a normal rail gun.

Which explained how that single shot had been able to destroy Rat's X-wing so easily.

So today, on this mission to Ariskandra, he found himself worrying that the rebel craft might also be Platinums. He didn't cherish the notion of losing another companion so quickly. Or being killed himself.

His fears were allayed, however, when they pulled close enough to the rebels to get a digital readout of their ship specs. They were apparently just six stolen imperial shuttles, retrofitted with standard blasters.

One of the shuttle pilots, apparently the commander, came in through the comlink. "Pilots of the Alliance," the impassive voice on the other end greeted them. "If you wish to avoid engaging us, the Ariskandran Federation fleet, in battle, I suggest you comply with our demands. They are-"

"You don't get any demands," Wedge cut him off grimly. His superiors had specifically stated that he was not to bargain with these rebels, just eliminate them.

"Then you-"

"Prepare to meet your maker," he told the rebel commander, switching off the comlink.

The twelve-man X-wing squadron accelerated to attack speed.

--

Luke sat in the medical center with Han Solo, who had returned from his latest cargo run earlier in the day, both of them somberly watching over Leia's unconscious form.

It troubled Luke that she did not look at peace, as unconscious people generally did. Her face was as placid and unblemished as it ever was, certainly, but it was as if she radiated with some great internal struggle. He could tell by the worried look on Han's face that he felt it, too.

Neither of them spoke for a great length of time. They simply sat in bedside chairs, staring at the face of the woman that they both loved, one as a fiance, one as a sister, and pondered, deep in thought.

Luke was fairly sure that Leia herself had been the cause of the great fire, or explosion, or whatever it had been, in her quarters. He didn't see any other reasonable way to explain that the room was utterly destroyed and she was virtually without a scratch. But he didn't have a clue how she would have accomplished such a feat: any physical device that she could have used would have certainly hurt _her_, as well as her surroundings, so that pretty much just left the Force.

Which was ridiculous.

Leia had only been training for days. There was no way she could have unleashed such power so quickly; even Luke, if he for some reason wanted do, would have had trouble incinerating an entire chamber as she'd done, apparently in one blast, and he'd been training longer than anyone alive.

_The last of the Jedi,_ he mused wryly. _But apparently not the _best _of the Jedi._

But if she had been responsible for the destruction..._why_? What would have possibly been her motivation for blasting her own chamber? Had there been an intruder? Perhaps the intruder had set off a bomb, and she had simply used the Force to protect herself.

_Yes, that could be it,_ he realized, staring at her serene face, flinching at the distress he knew wracked her underneath. It was certainly the most reasonable explanation, he thought, nodding slowly to himself. After all, the Force was not meant to be used as a weapon, but protecting her from an attacker would have served its function perfectly.

He nearly cracked a smile. _And God knows that she's got enough people that might want her dead._

He looked up at Han, who looked tired and spent, staring at Leia's face with an intense concentration, vainly willing her to awaken.

_She'll be alright._

He hoped.

--

Leia was floating.

Her eyes were open wide, staring, yet she could see nothing. Vast, unending darkness stretched onward from her in every direction, and she floated effortlessly through the nothingness, unsure whether she was still or moving at warp speed. There were no stars here, as in space, no distant pinpoints of light to light her way, to tell her that she was real, that there was still a place that she could go. She was naked, or at least thought she was; she could feel no clothes on her body, but then, weightless, sightless, floating through an eternal sea of nothingness, how would she have known?

The Force was still there, though. The Force was always there, as eternal and all-encompassing as the infinite void in which she traveled. The Force, which denied her so vehemently, which refused to obey her bidding, which burned in her mind like a fever.

She closed her eyes and reached out to it.

It did not resist, this time, and she exulted silently as she felt the pure, blazing power of the Force course into her, flow through her body, like wonderful liquid fire. Her senses increased a hundredfold, her fears vanished like the darkness before dawn, and she knew that her strength, her speed, her _power_ were unmatched, that she could take on the world, the galaxy, the universe alone. She smiled and drew on the Force, feeling it burn stronger and stronger within her, the feeling pure ecstasy, far more awesome, more powerful, than any lover's touch. Her soul was an unending chasm to draw the power into, and the more she pulled into her, the more she thirsted for the Force. Exulting, mighty, she spread her arms, floating in this void, and drank at the power, laughing silently.

_You like the power, don't you?_

She didn't see the source of the voice, didn't see anything in this place of darkness, but she recognized it as that of Darth Vader. Her father. It failed to fill her with terror as it once had, and she paid no heed to his presence.

Vader's dark laughter rang in her ears. _Abandon the power, my daughter, before it consumes you as it did me._

She smiled, ignoring him.

_The road you look down is a dark one, my daughter. Once you have started down it, you will not be able to turn back. Even now, you can feel the corruption, the darkness festering within you, can you not? Do not choose this path, Leia. There is nothing here but the darkness._

She barely heard him, intent on pulling the tremendous, wonderful essence of the Force into her being. There was no darkness in this beautiful thing.

_Then you have made the dark road your own, my daughter, my lost daughter Leia,_ his rasping voice whispered sadly, _and there will be no escape for you. My legacy will be yours, my daughter. My heir._

Her eyes still shut, she still drank at the Force.

Vader's presence was quickly fading. _May the Force be with you, my heir..._

Then he was gone.

And she laughed.

--

--


	2. Laughing Snake

Part II: Laughing Snake

We think we're awful smart, we think we're awful wise,

but when we're least expecting, comes the big surprise.

Lady Luck's in heaven and we're her little toys,

so break out the wine and fill your glasses, boys!

--Petronius, _The Satyricon_

When Leia opened her eyes, a tremendous pain blossomed in her head.

Han leaped from his chair and was at her side in a blink. He said something that was drowned out by the sudden flash of pain.

When it subsided, focused her eyes on her fiance and smiled. "Hello, Han."

He grinned at her. "So...you're, you know, okay? Luke said that there was some pretty heavy damage in your room, and we were talking, and we figured that there was some kind of attempt on your life, so I've been pretty worried and we-"

She interrupted him, not rudely. "I'm fine, Han."

"Right." He smiled, a little embarrassed by his outburst of emotions. "Right, well, I just...well, we were worried about you."

She turned to Luke, who was fixing his intense blue-gray eyes on her.

"Who attacked you?" he asked tensely.

She smiled lightly at him. "What, aren't you even going to say hello, brother?"

"I think Han said a long enough hello for both of us. Who attacked you?"

She leaned back in the bed, tired. _Attacked me? _she wondered, her head spinning. _What does he mean...?_

The memories came back to her in a rush. The fire. The Force. Channeling it out through her arms, destroying her chambers, incinerating everything in her path. But why did Luke think that someone attacked her...?

Luke's features softened. "Leia, look, I know you've got to be exhausted, but this is important."

The Force. She remembered the amazement of the incredible feeling of power when she had released the wave of fire, her own incomprehension that _she_ was the one channeling the destruction, that she had progressed that far that quickly.

Then she understood what Luke was asking. _He must assume that I couldn't be responsible for that damage, so an attacker must have wrecked my room and knocked me out._ That made sense.

"Luke, c'mon," Han was saying, his hand on his friend's shoulder. "She just woke up, and you're barraging her with questions already. Give her a break."

"Han, it's important and you know it," Luke hissed, scowling. "What if he comes back, did you ever consider that? Maybe next time she won't be able to protect herself with the Force!"

Han sighed. "Look, I don't think that this-"

"Luke," Leia interrupted him for the second time, "it's okay. The...attacker, he was consumed by the fire. He's dead."

She wasn't sure where the lie came from, or why she told it, but it seemed the right, the natural thing to do. Something deep within her told her not to tell Luke that _she_ had been the cause of that destruction.

Han smiled smugly. "What'd I tell ya, Luke?"

Luke didn't respond.

"Luke, really," she told him, her voice as honest and truthful as it ever was, "I saw him die. He won't be coming back."

_I can't tell him, _she mused sourly. _Not after he specifically told me never to use the Force as a direct attack weapon. _She knew that he would likely stop teaching her altogether if she learned that she had so flagrantly disobeyed his instruction, and she no longer felt as if she could live without training in the Force.

Her brother seemed to relax, and if any suspicion lingered in those blue-gray eyes, it was buried deep down. He had learned to trust his sister, after all.

--

There were numerous conferences and meetings that Leia was scheduled to attend that day. Explaining that she needed rest, she went to none of them, shutting herself away in her chambers instead. In private, she knew, she could gather her thoughts, analyze her new, strange feelings.

Except now that Han had returned, there wasn't a great deal of privacy to be had. He was seated in a chair in their quarters when she arrived, carefully tinkering with his blaster. It looked as if he'd managed to get ahold of a stronger power cell, and had decided to go ahead and make other modifications to the weapon while he was at it.

When he saw her come in, he looked up, a gruff smile on his face. "Welcome back, your worship."

She scowled at him. "Don't call me that, Han."

He raised his eyebrows, then shrugged. "You're the princess, princess." He turned his attention back to his blaster. "So, aside from nearly being bomb fodder, how were things while I was gone?"

"Nice and quiet," she returned icily.

He ignored the edge in her tone. "Must've driven you up the wall. Is Luke a competent teacher? It seems to me like he'd be too _nice_ to be a teacher. You have to be pretty firm, you know?"

"Luke teaches," she stated shortly. "It does the job."

"Great," he said, pulling at a small wire in the blaster casing. "I guess it goes without saying that you're at the top of your class, being the sister of Luke Skywalker the great Jedi knight."

She stood and stared at him in flinty silence.

He looked at her again, frowning. "Hey, look, I can understand you're being a little unsettled after being attacked by some nut with a bomb and all, but what's with the attitude? I thought you'd be happy to see me, after I've been gone awhile, you know?"

She didn't respond.

He sighed. "Look, if I've-"

Before he could complete his sentence, she had spun on her heel and stormed out of the door, growling softly to herself.

He rubbed a slightly greasy hand through his hair. "Right," he mumbled sourly. "Obviously I'm missing something here."

--

Wedge flicked on his comlink to the other pilots of Rogue Squadron. "Rogue Three," he said, referring to Jason, "we're approaching Endor, and we'll hit the atmosphere in about three minutes, thirty seconds. Can your bird take it, or do you want me to radio for help from home base?"

Jason had sustained a minor hit that had come distressingly close to hitting his primary stabilizers, and had succeeded in making his R2 unit mostly useless. He'd had a hell of a time getting the correct coordinates for the jump to hyperspace by manually entering the data into an antique compiler, but had managed to make it back to Endor in one piece, much to his and his companions' relief. None of the other X-wings had been so much scratched in the encounter with the pitiably equipped craft of the so-called Ariskandran Federation.

It had been a rather pathetic battle. The rebel pilots were far less skilled flyers than imperials, and had allowed themselves to be caught in the crescent that the twelve X-wing pilots had formed, forcing them to maneuver vertically and allowing Wedge's squad to get off an initial volley of shots. The pilots, who were not trained to avoid blaster fire, did not evade well and the first few shots took down three of the stolen shuttles. When the remaining three wheeled around for an attack, Rogue Squadron had already reformed, sandwiching them neatly in the middle. It had been target practice, pure and simple. It had only been by unfortunate chance that Jason had been hit; a purely lucky shot from the commander of the opposing 'fleet.'

"I think I can hold it, Rogue Leader," Jason replied. Wedge had figured that he was going to say that: the taciturn young man was about as resolute and stalwart a pilot as any Wedge'd ever known, and he generally refused to accept help even when it would have been the wiser choice.

Like now.

Wedge wasn't one to attempt to make another pilot's decisions for him, though, so he simply nodded. "Good, Three." He scanned the readouts he was getting from his R2 droid. "Twenty seconds to atmospheric breach."

For routine landing procedures, the R2's largely handled everything, leaving little for the pilot to do but monitor the feedback from the droid and onboard scanners and make sure everything was proceeding normally. Jason, with his malfunctioning droid, however, would have to handle his landing entirely manually, which Wedge was sure would grate on the young man after the stress he'd had to deal with to make the jump to light speed.

Jason seemed to handle it smoothly enough. Following routine manual landing procedure to the last detail, he took it slowly and carefully, using more power than was probably necessary in his forward shield to make sure the heat didn't affect his damaged craft. He kicked in the antigrav braking system gently, his eyes flashing back and forth from the cockpit window to the readouts from the atmosphere scanners to power monitors for the antigrav engine.

Wedge was relieved that he had managed it. It was a simple enough task, surely, but he had been a little worried that his companion's damaged craft wouldn't be able to hold up.

"Rogue Leader," Jason radioed him. Wedge, who had instructed his R2 unit to descend along with Jason to make sure he didn't falter, flickered his eyes over to the other X-wing pilot, who was scowling furiously as he carefully flipped levers and switches in the cockpit of his craft. "I've got a little problem here. Just lost power in my port engines. Auxiliary power's gone, too."

"Damn," Wedge cursed to himself. He knew it was too good to be true; nothing ever seemed to go off without a hitch of late. He opened the comlink channel. "Rogue Three, listen carefully. Pull up the full readout from your ancilary rear shield generator. Is it completely functional?" It _should_ have been perfectly functional, of course, but then, there was no reason that Wedge could see for the port engines to be malfunctioning, either. Jason had almost lost his primary stabilizers, but that was nowhere near the port engines. The X-wing design, durable as it was, had virtually no redundancy in its engines systems, and Wedge was perfectly aware that the fairly inexperienced pilot would have an almost impossible time landing the craft with only his starboard engines, since the loss of the port engines would very likely burn out the stabilizers and send the craft into a tailspin unless he maneuvered it exactly right.

"Affirmative, Rogue Leader," Jason said, quickly doing as the older pilot instructed him. "Eighty-five percent."

That was less than perfect, but it would have to do.

"Now open the small panel below the thrust gauge," Wedge told him. "Flip the manual engine command switch. It's the third from the right. Hit the two green buttons above the switch. Then move the two levers to the right of the switch to the 'off' position. That should bring up an options display over your primary engine analysis screen." He strained to remember the annoyingly intricate procedures that he hadn't had to use in a very long time, knowing that they had ceased training pilots in the antiquated processes, assuming that a completely disabled R2 unit meant the pilot was probably dead anyway. "There should be an option there to disable your ancilary rear shield generator. Select it. Close the options box. Now hit the left green button again, and move the right lever to the 'on' position. This should bring up a bunch of weird technical data on your analysis screen, and a yes/no box. Select no. A hologram of your ship will pop up, along with more technical gibberish. Touch the ancilary generator on the hologram, and hit no again when an options screen comes up. It will then ask you if you want to manually override the generator. Select yes. Now hit the left green button again. Another options screen will come up. Select 'reroute power,' then hit the gray 'link' switch next to the green buttons. Another options screen will pop up. Select 'port engines' from the list, and 'yes' when it asks you whether to alter the output type. Now move the left lever to the 'on' position. Select 'yes' on the activation screen." He wiped the sweat from his brow. "Your port engine should have about sixty percent power restored."

"Fifty-three," Jason said, obviously tremendously relieved as his craft steadied itself. "Um, Wedge?"

"What is it, Rogue Three?" _Not another malfunction,_ he prayed silently.

"Thanks, man. I owe you one."

Wedge grinned at him. "Damn straight you do, kid. Now shut up and land that thing."

--

Leia arrived in the training room two hours early, and was relieved to find that she was alone. She needed time on her own, to think, to remember, to analyze the things that had happened to her in the past few days without Luke or Han or anyone else bothering her.

The memory of the fire in her room was still a bit blurry, and she could not, for the life of her, remember _why_ she had suddenly decided to torch her own quarters. There hadn't been an attacker, as she'd told Han and her brother, she was certain of that, but the recollection of it was vague and uncertain. It just didn't make any sense: she had never been the type to throw tantrums, to break things when she was angry. She considered herself a very reasonable, rational person.

And, of course, aside from that, she had no idea how she had managed to throw a wave of fire with such tremendous power. She was a novice, for God's sake, barely even in training yet.

But she had.

However vague the overall picture was to her, she remembered very clearly the feeling as the torrent of fire coursed through her body and out her hands. The unbelievable feeling of control, of strength, was simply overpowering.

And what of afterwards...?

She sighed. She thought that she had simply fainted after throwing the fiery wave, and her next memory was that of awakening with a splitting headache in the medical center, Han and Luke staring worriedly at her.

But...

No.

There was something else, something she'd forgotten. It teased her, on the edge of her conscious memory, just out of her grasp. A voice, a familiar voice was all that she could bring to mind. Grabbing onto that fragment of the memory, she stared at it with her mind's eye, analyzing it, trying to recall whose voice it had been, what they had spoken of, what exactly the voice had sounded like.

It had been deep, she remembered that much. Deep, and ominous, and somehow...hollow.

Dark.

Evil.

_Darth Vader. _The name seared her mind, and she found that her breathing was ragged. _A dream. I spoke to Darth Vader in a dream...no, he spoke to me. What did he say? He spoke to me, and told me...told me...what? What he tell me?_

She ground her teeth in frustration. She sensed, she knew that what he had said was of overwhelming importance, but she could not remember.

_I must remember,_ she told herself grimly, closing her eyes, trying to bring together the shards of the dream.

By the time Luke arrived, fifteen minutes before the start of the training session, her recollections were no better.

--

That session, Leia fought a slightly older woman, about thirty or so, named Aurens Locke. She was considerably taller than Leia, and obviously stronger; the sleeves of her training shirt had been ripped off, and her arms were lean and wiry, without an ounce of fat on them. She also moved with an athletic grace that told Leia that she was probably very fast in addition to her other advantages.

"You ready?" Locke asked her, a cocky look on her face. That look told Leia that she was no doubt one of the better saber-wielders in the class.

Leia nodded, extending her energy blade, and she soon found the truth of her assumption.

Locke was not only surprisingly skilled with the lightsaber, she moved _much_ faster than Leia could have anticipated. In fact, Leia had never seen anyone move as fast before in her life. She spun, slashed, moved from short to long range, attacking with the speed and temerity of a swooping falcon. And she hit hard. Leia, caught off-guard by her unexpectedly rapid movements, took several forceful blows, staggered backwards, and Locke, moving like a panther, kicked her legs out from under her and somehow managed to pivot while the luckless Leia was still in midair. Locke spun, slamming her forearm down on Leia's sternum. She landed with a loud thump on the floor, the wind knocked out of her. Locke brought the humming saber to her throat.

Leia was better prepared for Locke's blazing speed the next round, for all the good it did her. She parried Locke's first volley of strikes, then took a heavy hit when Locke feinted with the lightsaber and hop-stepped forward, slamming her foot into Leia's stomach. Hopelessly trying to regain her balance, she quickly fell prey to Locke's rapid-fire follow-up attacks, hitting her in the thigh, the chest, the shoulder, the neck, the calf, the midsection. She once again was knocked to the floor as her opponent cut her forward leg out from under her with her lightsaber, then hopped forward lithely, sending Leia reeling with a massive kick to her ribs.

She lay there on the ground momentarily, scowling, feeling a dark anger bubble up inside her. There _had_ to be some weak point to exploit, something that would take Locke off-guard enough to allow Leia to go on the offensive. But there was nothing: closing quarters, as was Leia's general strategy against the giant Sabrul Mantier, would not work against Locke and she knew it. For one, Locke was a lot faster than she was, and, while taller, was not so much taller that she would be unable to adequately defend herself at close quarters. And Locke was much better with her feet than Mantier was, both in keeping her balance and in the quickness of her movements; her kicks were so effective because Leia didn't even see them coming before they smashed into her.

_I could use the Force, _she thought, scowling inwardly. _This arrogant woman would not last a second if I used the Force._

Then she sighed. _But I won't. I can't. Luke has forbidden me to do so._

So she pulled herself wearily to her feet, activating her saber once more. She was, of course, still allowed to use the Force to simply enhance her abilities, but, although she had training for endless hours attempting to do so, she had felt not so much as a...spark... She frowned as she felt something tugging at the edge of her mind, some aspect of the half-remembered dream that she could not quite recall.

Locke smiled at her. To Leia's eye, it was a singularly nasty, condescending smile. "Are you ready?"

Leia gave a short, angry nod, lunging at the infuriating woman. Her three strikes seemed in slow motion compared to the snake-like movements that Locke used to parry them, then counterattack ferociously. It felt as if she was being pummelled on all sides at one time, and she felt Locke's lightsaber sizzle painfully first against her ribs, then her shoulder, then her legs and her arms and her head and her throat-

The Force was there.

Leia seized ahold of it, and felt the blazing essence of it course powerfully, wonderfully through her body.

Locke's next attacks, two false strikes with the saber, a sweep, and a strong forward slash, seemed laughably slow to Leia, then, and she, seemingly stumbling backwards, evaded the first three with ease, then chopped sideways at the forward slash. Locke's features betrayed her surprise as Leia suddenly danced to her unguarded side and whipped her saber at her legs. She did not nearly manage to block it in time, and it stung painfully. Attempting pitiably to regain her dominating position, she twirled to one side rapidly, only to be met once again by Leia's humming weapon. It hit hard against her abdomen, and nearly knocked the wind out of her, and Leia mercilessly pressed the attack. Moving with tremendous speed and power, she spun her shoulder to one side, avoiding Locke's attempt at counterattacking, and caught her opponent's wrist in a vice-like grip, then used her torque to painfully twist Locke's arm. She cried out, but Leia ignored it and brought the buzzing saber down on her elbow, then slid it up her upper arm to her neck, sizzling against her skin the entire way. Locke tried to jerk backwards, to no avail, Leia's small hand still clamped viciously on her wrist. Leia smiled venomously, chambering her leg and slamming it down on Locke's right knee. It cracked and she screamed as she felt the bone split.

Before Leia could wreak any more damage to Locke's now helpless form, Luke intervened on her behalf.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Master Skywalker demanded, his blue-gray eyes hurt and angry. Aurens listened to him through a haze of pain, not even noticing that all the other students had stopped their own matches, watching the spectacle unfold before them. Not only were they all stunned at the naked viciousness the seemingly kind princess has displayed, some of them were hoping to see the Master show his prowess for the first time.

"Training," Princess Leia responded, a sadistic grin on her face. Fury burned hot in her eyes as she squared off against the Master, her saber humming and buzzing. "Want to train with me, brother?"

_Brother? _Aurens wondered, dazed.

"What is the matter with you, Leia?" Master Skywalker growled, not touching his own saber. Aurens absently wondered whether it was real or a training weapon. "You just broke Aurens's knee, and you're _smiling_ about it!"

Leia laughed. "It was great fun, brother. What I'm about to do to you will be even more fun."

"What do you-"

He was cut off as Leia lunged at him, lashing out with incredible speed. The students watched breathlessly as Master Skywalker smoothly parried the blows with his lightsaber, matching her speed with ease. She swung her training saber in an overhand arc that the Master easily caught and threw aside with his own weapon, then stepped forward and slashed twice. Neither attack hit the princess, but Aurens didn't think either was meant to. Instead, they sheared long, crackling slices in her training outfit, putting to rest any doubts that Master Skywalker was not fighting with a fully functional lightsaber. Before she could even think, let alone react, the Master had chopped at her weapon, knocking it out of her hand, cracking, splitting, and shattering the metal hilt of the saber. It fell in pieces to the ground, nearly ten feet away from them.

About the same time as the destroyed weapon landed, Leia's eyes rolled back in her head and she fell forward, limp, into Master Skywalker's arms.

--

Aurens remembered little from that point onwards. For her, there was only the pain from then on, as Vastiar, Iris, and a young man called Jeikar had lifted her from the ground onto a stretcher that Jeikar had retrieved from one of the neighboring rooms. They had taken her to the medical center, she vaguely remembered through the haze that clouded her memory, and she had been given some sort of shot from one of the attendant droids, and...

And then she'd woken up.

She sat up, surveying her surroundings. A small medical droid was running several surgical tools through an internal cleaner, and she saw that her knee had been entirely repaired by the little machine. She was grateful for that: she would not have wanted to go about for the rest of her life with a mechanical knee, regardless of how everyone insisted that you couldn't even tell the difference. On the far side of the room, partially cloaked in shadow, Vastiar stood, engaged in a quiet conversation with Jeikar. When he saw that she was awake, he smiled genuinely at her. Jeikar, a black-haired boy who couldn't have been older than sixteen or seventeen, grinned cheerfully at her and waved.

"Welcome back to the realms of the living," Jeikar said to her. His face, not particularly comely, lit up when he smiled, making him appear even more boyish than usual. "How's the knee?"

"Better," she responded, returning his pleasant grin. "It was nice of you two to stay here and watch over me. How long have I been out?"

Jeikar shrugged, running a hand through thick hair black as ink. "Just a few hours. Not that long. We were just talking about how amazing these new medical droids are; how they can heal even pretty bad wounds like yours so fast, you know?"

Vastiar licked his lips. "We've also been trying to figure out what happened. To you, I mean. A lot of people were watching, but none of them are quite sure."

That was odd. "It was pretty simple," Aurens told him carefully. "The princess grabbed hold of my wrist and kicked my knee in. It broke."

"No, no." He waved her explanation away. "I don't mean that. I mean _why_ the princess suddenly decided to kick your knee in. I've always been a pretty good judge of character, and she's always seemed so..." He flailed about for the word.

"Nice?" she suggested, her voice more than slightly sour.

He nodded. "Yes. Nice."

"I always thought so, too," she said, sighing. "And we were just sparring - I was beating her, actually - when she suddenly went crazy on me." She stared at the ceiling, thoughtful. "The weird thing is that she suddenly got a lot _better_. And I don't just mean that she was hitting harder because she was mad, I mean that out of nowhere, her movements were a lot more fluid, her balance was better, her reflexes were sharper. I'll swear to it that her skill level increased, too."

"That is definitely weird," Jeikar agreed, deadpan.

"You don't believe me."

Jeikar shrugged. "Well, I mean, it's not that I think you're lying or anything, but...I mean, how would she suddenly just _get better_, you know?"

"No. I don't know. That's why I said it was weird."

"Maybe she just got in a few lucky shots," the black-haired boy offered. "That makes more sense to me."

She nodded. "Makes more sense to me, too. But it _wasn't what happened_." She glowered at him. "Look, I was on the receiving end of her sudden murderous impulse, you got it, kid? Don't tell me what I saw and didn't see."

None of them spoke for several moments.

"So...are you going to keep training?" Vastiar ventured, at length.

"Yes."

He nodded approvingly. "Good. But...you're not worried that she'll go berserk on you again?"

She stared piercingly at him. "Would _you_ be worried, Vastiar?"

Vastiar nodded emphatically. "You better believe it. Next time you might wind up dead, or have to get a limb replaced."

"And would you continue your training?"

He smiled faintly. "Of course. You think a little thing like death would scare me off from an opportunity of this magnitude?"

She snorted back laughter, wondering if he was being pretentious. "I do, however," she muttered darkly, "mean to get to the bottom of this. I'm going to have a talk with Master Skywalker, see what he knows about this. Today. I know he's close to the princess." Then she frowned, her eyes clouded. "And she said something that's bothering me."

"Oh?" Vastiar raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

"Princess Leia called the Master 'brother.' What could that mean?"

"It could mean that he's her brother," Jeikar interjected helpfully.

She laughed shortly. "Not too fucking likely."

"Maybe it's like the thing that patients develop with their doctors," Vastiar suggested, grinning sardonically. "You know, when they start thinking of their doctor as their parent? Maybe murderers start seeing their victims as their brothers right before they slaughter them."

She started to climb out of the bed, sighed. "That wasn't funny at all, Vastiar."

"Thank you." He looked inordinately pleased.

--

But when the three of them made it back down to the training room, Master Skywalker was nowhere to be seen. In fact, almost everyone had left, and the sole figure still present was Sabrul Mantier. They had entered quietly, and if he noticed them, he did not show it, absorbed in his practice.

He was practicing in a manner none of them were familiar with: it was an intricate, dance-like series of movements with his lightsaber, graceful and powerful. It looked as though he had combined a series of combat movements into a long pattern, combined with some of the exercises that the Master had them go through every session. He bore a striking resemblance to a stalking panther, with his soft footfalls and deadly grace.

They stood, transfixed, watching the old man go through the complex pattern.

When he had finished, he turned to look at them.

"Have you, uh, seen Master Skywalker?" Jeikar asked, embarrassed that he had been caught staring.

Mantier sighed. "He left with the princess Leia. I fear she is not well." He turned his intense gaze to Aurens. "And it appears you've had your leg healed. I'm glad it didn't have to be replaced."

"So am I," Aurens responded emphatically. "And I'd _say_ that the princess isn't well. She went nuts."

He didn't speak.

"We were just sparring normally, you know, and suddenly she gets all crazy. And I swear that she actually got better, you know, more powerful. Not just the adrenaline making her stronger, either; I'm saying that she suddenly was able to move faster and strike harder. Exponentially faster and harder."

"Her knee was cracked up pretty bad," Jeikar put in. "The princess hit it really hard."

Mantier nodded. "I know. I was watching."

"Well," Aurens grumbled, miffed, "you seem pretty calm about the whole thing. Princess Leia goes on a murderous rampage, breaks my knee, and tries to kill Master Skywalker, and you don't seem bothered at all."

He sighed heavily, tucking his lightsaber into his black band belt. "I am bothered by it, Aurens Locke. More bothered than any of you, I suspect."

She snorted. "Oh, did Leia break _your_ leg, too, when no one was watching?"

Mantier shook his head sadly. "It is not the results I'm speaking of, Locke. In all your righteous wrath, have you stopped to think what might have _caused_ her sudden bloodlust? Or did you think it simply popped up out of nowhere?"

"Well, I..." she trailed off, staring at him. "I'm...we're not sure. That's why we're trying to find Master Skywalker. We figure he might know."

The old man nodded. "He does. So would Iris, or Galtan, or Sandros."

She tried to call the images of those three people into her mind. "'Iris, Galtan, or Sandros?'" she repeated, puzzled. Iris was an older woman, middle-aged, fair with a saber but not nearly as good as she was. Galtan was a lean, whiplike young man in his early twenties with skin black as night and extraordinarily sharp reflexes. Sandros she did not know. "Why? What part do they play in this?"

"No part. But they are the only three people, other than myself, Master Skywalker, and Leia, who can feel the Force with any strength yet."

"So?"

Mantier looked at her levelly. "Think about the class you are taking, Aurens Locke."

She frowned. "You're saying that the princess used the Force on me?"

He shook his head. "Not at all. She used it on herself to make herself stronger; I understand she's been attempting to do so for quite some time. Today, she succeeded."

"And the Force suddenly turned her into a murderous psycho. Somehow, I find that hard to believe." She scowled. "And if it _was_ true, why the hell are you even here, Sabrul? Why would you want to mess with something that dangerous?"

"Master Skywalker has said that the Force is not dangerous unless misused," he responded imperturbably.

"That's pretty vague," Jeikar pointed out. "Who the hell gets to define 'misuse?'"

"I'm not sure," the old man admitted, "but I've always thought that the Master meant for us to judge it according to our own consciences. And he said that anger, aggression, and fear were three ways to misuse the Force, as well as attacking directly with it."

Vastiar nodded, troubled. "I remember him saying that, too, because I was a little worried that my own attempts to use it as a battle weapon would lead me to the dark side. Anger, aggression, fear." He looked toward Aurens, his gaze thoughtful. "Your defeating of her would have aroused all three, don't you think? Come to think of it," he realized, "I remember that the princess used to be far and away the best fighter in the class. She was even able to thrash you, Sabrul. But then, she sort of...lost it. It was like she went from being the best to being one of the worst. I remember, because I was watching this guy who I knew wasn't very good beat up on her pretty easily."

"Soar," Jeikar offered. "The quiet guy. I know who you're talking about. I remember seeing her spar him a couple days back. He's a great shot with a blaster, but a terrible swordfighter."

"Exactly. So she takes a fall, and her pride's hurting pretty bad, so she's fighting Aurens here, and when she starts getting beaten for the umpteenth time, she loses her temper, uses the Force in the way that she knows she's not supposed to, and goes berserk." He frowned. "But I don't understand why she would have attacked Master Skywalker."

Mantier's brows knotted. "The princess Leia used to do this little trick where she'd concentrate and fire off these little kinetic blasts. It really helped her in the fights that we had. But Master Skywalker forbade that one day to her, out of the blue. I guess that could explain her misgivings toward him."

"So it all fits," Jeikar concluded, looking pleased. "Just a long chain of bad luck and bad circumstances."

That did not seem to make the old man feel better. "I don't know," he rumbled, sighing. "It just seems all wrong, somehow. When I said that this bothers me more than any of you, I did not speak in jest. I can feel the Force and I know none of you can yet, so perhaps that gives me a different perspective, but..." He shook his head. "This just seems ominous, to me."

"We should still talk to the Master about it," Jeikar admitted, "but I think our explanation makes it all make sense."

It _did_ make it all make sense.

And it was all wrong.

--

"The princess sends her regrets, and says that she will not be able to attend the meeting."

Commodore Jaire ve'Ternas rubbed his aching temples. "'Not able to attend the meeting?'" he repeated darkly, favoring the messenger droid with a carefully controlled glare. "And why is the princess not able to attend the meeting?"

"The princess has taken ill, Commodore, and she sends her regrets." The droid was a gold-brass color, and had a singularly irritating voice.

"Yeah, she sends her regrets. Wonderful. I heard you the first time." He sighed. "Why did she send _you_ to tell me this instead of contacting me over the holophone?"

"I am C-3PO, Commodore, human-cyborg relations, one of the princess's most trusted servants, and I assure you that she-"

"Forget it," Jaire cut him off, glowering. "Look, fine, the princess is ill. Tell her I hope she gets well soon, and inform her that this is _important_, and that I need to meet with her as soon as she is better. Understood?"

The droid nodded. It had a jerky, almost spasmodic way of moving. Protocol droids like this one had seemed almost to be built simply to annoy everyone within earshot, and were one of the primary reasons that the commodore avoided the use of droids in general. "Very good, sir," it told him, waddling slowly out the doorway with a very self-important air about it.

Captain Richard Strager slammed his fist down against the reinforced steel desk of Jaire's office. "I don't fucking believe this," he grated furiously. "She _cancelled_. A week ago, we'd finally managed to convince her of the urgency of the situation, and now she gets sick and cancels. I don't care if she has the Goddamned palakastic plague! She said she was going to be here, she _swore_ that she was going to be here!"

"She's a princess, Strager," Commodore Jaire told him dryly. "She's no doubt accustomed to doing as she pleases."

"Great reason." Richard snorted derisively. "Look, Commodore, I understand that you think she'd be the most open to hear our plea out of all the Council members, but do we really want to rely on someone that...capricious?"

Jaire shrugged. "Not at all. But since it's either that or nothing, I'll take my chances with her." Then he frowned. "But it certainly does bother me. How sick can she possibly be? I saw her training with Jedi Master Skywalker only a few days past, hale and healthy as a horse. And surely I'd have heard something if there was a new epidemic running loose."

"I don't trust her," the captain grunted.

"I don't trust anyone," Jaire snapped. "But I know the princess to be a true and honorable patriot, and I feel very strongly that she will be sympathetic to our cause, Captain! This is too important to enlist the help of someone with wavering loyalties. I cannot understand why the princess has cancelled on us, and I intend to find out, but for now, we stick with our original plan. I will get the meeting rescheduled for the morrow, and I _will_ get the princess to attend, one way or another, Strager."

Richard Strager sighed. "I hope so, Commodore. And if she is playing us false..."

Jaire shook his head sharply. "No, Captain. She is not. She _would_ not. That I feel sure of."

The captain stood up abruptly. "I wish I shared your confidence, Jaire. I really do."

With that, he gave a perfunctory salute and exited the small office, leaving Commodore Jaire alone with his thoughts.

--

Leia awoke slowly, groggily, and found herself staring at her brother's somber visage. He was seated on the edge of her bed, his eyes mostly unreadable, but she saw an accusatory cast far in their depths.

_I wonder what for,_ she thought, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. _Maybe he found out the truth about the fire in my chamber..._

But that was not it, she knew, the instant that he spoke. "Why?" he asked, his voice full of pain, frustration, and incomprehension. He sounded like a man lost and confused, like a man betrayed by a close friend.

By a sister.

The memories came back to her all in a rush. She remembered reaching out to the Force, the incredible euphoria as it permeated her being, of finally being able to regain her battle skill, and then the surge of hate that had overwhelmed her, and even after she had clearly beaten her opponent, she had grabbed her wrist and...

She closed her eyes, shuddered. The hideous crack that Aurens Locke's knee had made as she had kicked it sideways resounded in her ears, followed by the woman's shriek of pain. And then Luke had stepped in to stop her, and she'd...

_I attacked him. _The thought was like a lightning bolt through her mind. _I attacked my brother._

And she had intended to hurt him. She had _wanted_ to hurt him, wanted so badly to cause him pain, to make him suffer, and she remembered the surging roar in ears as she'd charged him, channeling all the power of the Force that she could muster into her arms, into the lightsaber. The feeling of incredible hate, and the elation she'd felt as she wanted to rend him limb from limb, and...

Leia stared at the suffering eyes of her brother, and was suddenly overwhelmed by an unimaginable sorrow, and regret, and bitter guilt.

"Luke," she whispered, feeling the tears roll down her cheeks, not caring. "Luke..."

"Why?" he asked again, hoarsely, accusingly.

She jerked up, crying, and fiercely hugged him. "I'm so sorry, Luke," she sobbed. "I'm so sorry...I'm so sorry..."

He returned her embrace, sighing softly.

Had she looked at his eyes then, she would have seen there the reflection of the dark fears that ate at his soul.

--

"Sir?"

Admiral Galrond looked up from his plain wooden desk to see Lieutenant Iskary's crisp form standing in front of him, Iskary's ever-present polite but determined expression gazing down respectfully at him. He set down his pen. "Yes, Lieutenant?" Iskary being who he was, Galrond knew that he wouldn't interrupt his writing unless it was something important.

"Rogue Squadron's mission was successful, Admiral," the lieutenant reported. "The so-called Ariskandran Federation's fleet has been exterminated, and we did not sustain any casualties."

"Mm-hmm," Galrond mumbled, looking directly at the younger man. "Obviously that's not all you have to tell me."

A hint of a smile brushed at Iskary's thin lips. "No sir, it isn't. I thought you might be interested to know that Princess Leia Organa has been neglecting her duties as a Councillor of late."

The admiral didn't show any sign of surprise. "Nice little tidbit. Why did you think I might be interested to know that?"

"May I speak frankly, sir?"

He gave a cursory nod. "I encourage all under me to speak frankly, Lieutenant."

"Sir, you've often spoken about disagreeing with the princess's ideas. Might this not be a possible way to get her removed from the Council, and thus remove her as a threat to you?"

Galrond stood up, facing the lieutenant. The admiral did not cut an impressive figure, and he knew it: he was short, ungainly, and more than a little overweight. His limbs were just this side of stunted, and his face was far from being pleasant to look at. Yet there was an air of dignity about him that made others stop and listen. "I disagree with the princess, Lieutenant Iskary," he said, firmly. "That does not mean I am ready to stab her in the back. Perhaps you are not familiar with the princess's career, Lieutenant, but I assure you, it has encompassed things that you and I can barely even dream about. Or have nightmares about, I should say."

"What do you mean, sir?"

The admiral sighed heavily. "Have you ever had a nightmare about watching, powerlessly, as your homeworld was blown to pieces?"

"No, I haven't, sir."

"That happened to Leia, Lieutenant. And let me tell you something else you may not know: Princess Leia Organa was tortured, given mind control drugs, subjected to unimaginable pain by Darth Vader himself. You know what he wanted?"

"No, I don't, sir."

"He wanted the location of the Alliance's base. And you know what else? She _didn't give it to him_." The admiral sat back down, shaking his head. "In any case, Lieutenant, the point is that I am not going to backstab the princess. I hear she has simply taken ill in any case."

Iskary nodded. "As you say, sir."

Galrond went back to his writing. "You are dismissed, Lieutenant."

Long after Lieutenant Iskary had taken his leave, the admiral had stopped writing, and instead sat, his chin resting contemplatively on his steepled hands, thinking about the rumors that were beginning to wind their way up to him that suggested that he was wrong, that the princess had not simply 'taken ill,' that something was truly amiss with her. The rumors were conflicting and ridiculous, but somehow ominous all the same. One of them claimed that the princess had taken up a toy lightsaber and attacked Jedi Master Skywalker. Another said that she had suffered from a bout of insanity and broken a woman's leg. Another said that she was dead, and that Skywalker had killed her. No, another disagreed, Skywalker had just broken her legs for insubordination. No, said a third, Leia had been an imperial sympathizer all along and had organized an evil plot to assassinate Skywalker. Another proclaimed that Leia was really a reincarnation of Darth Vader, and was in cahoots with Skywalker, intent on bringing the downfall of the Alliance.

The rumors got more and more wild and farfetched, as rumors have the tendency to do.

What Galrond worried about was that the rumors would damage the princess's ability to function as a Councillor. Who, after all, wanted to follow the lead of a Councillor who they believed was Darth Vader reincarnate? Galrond truly believed what he had told Iskary, that although he and Leia disagreed often and sometimes severely, he wished no trouble on the woman, who he viewed as a great, if politically misguided, patriot.

He decided that it would be wisest to call a meeting with the princess and discuss it with her personally. After all, they said that within even the strangest rumor lay a grain of truth.

--

Rance smiled at him. "Wedge, you're letting your paranoia eat away at you. You need to relax."

Pasik Tars nodded, swirling his blood-red cocktail slowly. "Yes, Wedge. You definitely need to relax. It's like there's this little black stormcloud emanating from you, and God help me, you're ruining the evening for all three of us."

Wedge smirked. "I sure wouldn't want to do _that_, seeing what party animals the three of us are."

"Ouch, sarcastic humor." Tars took a small sip from his drink. "The stormcloud just fired off a lightning bolt."

She raised an eyebrow. "That was sarcastic humor? I think I caught the sarcasm, but I know a good joke when I hear one, and that was nothing like a good joke."

"That's because it was _sarcastic_," Tars told her, grinning. "It's meant to be bitter and mean-spirited but somehow also funny."

"Well, that wasn't," Rance responded, drinking her ale in big gulps. "So I'm rating it as a bad joke."

"But it wasn't a joke in the first place," Tars explained to her patiently. "It was _sarcasti_-"

She gave him the evil eye. "Enough of your semantics already. You want to take this outside?"

"Hmm." Tars looked pointedly at his cocktail. "Not unless 'this' is my drink. And even then, I'd prefer to stay in here where it's nice and light. It's all dark and creepy outside."

She raised an eyebrow. "'Dark and creepy?' What kind of starfighter pilot are you, sitting there all afraid of the dark?"

Tars grinned. "Space isn't creepy, my dear Rance."

"And nighttime on Endor is? What, are you afraid one of the local teddy bears is going to come out and eat you?"

Wedge snickered at hearing the Ewoks referred to as 'teddy bears.' They both turned to stare at him in mock amazement.

"My God, was that a _laugh_?"

"In the name of all that's holy, I believe it was! Rejoice, therefore!"

Wedge's humor dried up like spilled water on a hot day on Tatooine. "Undoubtedly, that means that both of you want me to buy you drinks."

Tars chortled. "You know, I _like_ this guy. He volunteers to pay for the drinks without me even having to ask."

"I dunno about that," Rance said, smirking. "It's kind of unnerving how I can't even tell when he's employing your so-called 'sarcastic humor' and when he's just being Wedge."

"Has it occurred to you that they might be one and the same?"

"In fact, I was about to say that, but I was afraid he would make me the subject of one of his bitter and mean-spirited but somehow also funny jokes. Except it wouldn't be funny. That would just make it worse."

Tars lifted his cup. "Well, then, a toast to bad jokes."

Rance grinned. "And sarcastic humor."

They both drained their cups to the dregs.

Wedge sat and brooded.

Nearly thirty minutes passed before Wedge said another word to his ever-more-inebriated companions. "Rance, Tars."

Tars, who could hold his liquor fairly well, smiled broadly at his Squadron Leader. He looked more than a little tipsy in spite of his tolerance for the alcohol.

Rance, who couldn't, snickered at him inanely.

Wedge cleared his throat, before speaking carefully. "Do you know what I think?"

"I didn't know you thought at all," she commented in between giggles, then collapsed in a fit of helpless laughter. "Thought...at...all!" she repeated to herself, howling with laughter. "Thought at all! It doesn't get any funnier than that, boys! How's that for sarcastic humor, Wedge? Thought...at all!"

He studiously ignored his drunken squad-mate. "I think that something big's going down."

"Y'hear that?" Rance asked, laughing so hard she was crying. "Something big's going down! Looks like Jabba the Hutt's doomed, Tars! Get it? Get it? Big? Jabba? Big?"

"Luke Skywalker killed Jabba the Hutt some time ago, as you would have remembered if you weren't so damned drunk," Wedge muttered sourly.

"Jabba the Hutt is _dead_?" Rance demanded in mock surprise, then clambered to the top of their table. "You hear that, all you pathetic slobs?" she roared, swaying unsteadily on the table. "Jabba the Hutt is already dead! Well, we don't care! We're patriots! One death isn't enough! Jabba the Hutt shall die a second time! Let's kill 'em all, the worthless bastards! Three cheers, boys!"

Several of the more drunken patrons of the bar cheered, not caring in the slightest what they were cheering for, only noticing that there was a drunk, attractive woman dressed in a rather revealing tank-top standing on one of the tables.

"Rogue Ten, reporting in! We're pumped up, Rogue Leader!" Rance announced, giving a booming laugh. "Where's the target?"

Wedge mumbled something unprintable under his breath.

"Hutt!" Rance shouted, parading around on the tabletop. "Hutt! Hutt! We want Hutt! Hutt! Hutt! We want Hutt! Hutt! Hutt! We wan-" She slipped and fell off the table, cutting herself off mid-cheer, but the other intoxicated patrons had already taken up the cry, pounding their mugs furiously against the wooden tables. There was an audible crack from the back of the establishment, then several angry shouts, followed by more cracks, then a loud 'thump.' A young man slid across the bar face-first, shattering no small number of glasses, then managed to get to his feet, picked up a stool, and bashed the man nearest to him. The man growled, caught the stool mid-swing, and sent a fist into the young man's stomach. A friend of the young man jumped to his defense, tackling the puncher from behind, who spun and threw him into the gathering crowd of onlookers. At that point, chaos erupted, as the patrons cheerfully started beating each other's heads in, all the while inanely shouting, "Hutt! Hutt! We want Hutt!"

"Oh shit," Tars muttered, rolling up the sleeves of his flight suit. "There's a brawl coming our way, Wedge."

Rance pulled herself up from the floor, laughing and bellowing some incomprehensible battle cry as she charged into the fray.

"Why doesn't anyone ever listen to me?" Wedge complained, as he was dragged into the mob.

--

Vastiar's dorm room was a small, pathetic thing. It was a completely unremarkable cube shape, scarcely long enough to fit a bed in, made of the same dull gray concrete that everything else was made of in the Temple-turned-Alliance-headquarters, and it had a miserable strip of fluorescent lightning overhead that was half burned out, so only half the room had any appreciable light in it, and even that wasn't very appreciable. At least, Vastiar didn't appreciate it, seeing as how small and pathetic the room in general was. The Council, in response to the numerous daily complaints from other people who were living in equally pitiful dorm rooms, kept saying that the new Alliance quasi-capital - Vastiar thought that was a riot, them calling their headquarters-under-contruction a 'quasi-capital' - was nearing completion, and pretty soon everyone was going to have a nice, big, well-lit, warm chamber to live in. Everyone with an ounce of sense knew that it was a load of bull, since something as complicated as a quasi-capital obviously was going to take longer than just a couple months to finish. The Republic wasn't built in a day, after all. But since it looked like they wanted to build their 'New Republic' in a day, it would undoubtedly be a joke when it was finished. Probably something like the Old Republic, right before the Emperor had just about single-handedly crushed its worthless old Senate.

He shared the dorm with a young man named Taren, who thankfully was clean and well-groomed. Taren was actually one of the few people that Vastiar liked in the Alliance, the others being Aurens, that kid Jeikar, and Master Skywalker. And old Sabrul Mantier, who was just so damn impressive that Vastiar found himself actually looking up to him; not like he looked up to Master Skywalker, since he was the only remaining Jedi and all that, but like the old man was a god or something. Thinking about him, he didn't seem so impressive, but actually getting up-close-and-personal with the old guy with something else entirely. He just had that _aura_. Vastiar thought he remembered some other folks around that he could stand, but he couldn't seem to dredge their names up from his tired mind.

Princess Leia, now. She had sort of an aura, too, but he figured that was probably just his imagination playing tricks on him since he'd seen her break Aurens's knee and attack the Master and all. And he couldn't remembering noticing her having any special aura before she'd attacked Aurens and Master Skywalker, and, since he hadn't actually seen her since then, he decided that his mind was indeed playing tricks on him. But, even so, he couldn't shake the feeling that there was something somehow _evil_ about the princess's aura. Not that she actually had a dark vortex swirling around her or anything like that, but it was just this eerie feeling he got when he was around her. Or had gotten. Or rather, had remembered having gotten, which probably meant that he hadn't gotten it at all and he was just making things up in hindsight. He did that a lot. Pretty soon, he was sure, his creatively-addled memory would have the princess sprouting horns as he walked by and dripping blood from a pair of fangs. And she'd probably have claws, too. Lots of so-called 'evil' things had been portrayed as clawed, so that had no doubt become associated in his mind with anything evil. Needless to say, regardless of whether or not Leia really did have skulls spinning around her head or whatever, he didn't have any great love for the woman.

Taren, though, he did like. His full name was Taren Auscarandos, and he was actually a pretty good-looking guy, with nicely-combed short blond hair with a little wave in it and all. He was pretty skinny - actually, he was very skinny - and didn't look all too strong, and his voice was kind of puny and girlish, but he still managed to look good just the same. He was nice and everything, too. He didn't lie, and he was basically friendly and trusting. He was the kind of guy that you lent stuff to and didn't worry about getting it back, because he was just so honest-looking.

Vastiar's mind always spun out in every which way when he was tired, like now, so he just lay on his small, pathetic little bed - hard as a rock, naturally - and let his mind spin. It was certainly more enjoyable than thinking about how he was lying in a small, pathetic room on a small, pathetic bed where it was too damn cold and the lights didn't work right, or about Princess Leia's evil aura, which probably didn't exist but managed to rile him up all the same.

So, instead, Vastiar lay and dreamt about star travel, about the only thing that he truly enjoyed, aside from the newly-discovered obsession of the Force and Jedi training. He hadn't been lying to Aurens when he'd told her he was only nineteen, but he was also a great deal better traveled than most nineteen-year-olds were, and had a cargohold's worth of real-world experience more than them, too. It wasn't all star travel, unfortunately; a lot of it was miserable, gritty land travel, on some sputtering land speeder or lousy hovering passenger freighter that traveled about a foot per hour and broke down every other minute or so. And it hadn't been some pleasure cruise, either. Before joining up with the Alliance as a droid technician, he'd worked on the planet Varista, a miserable, desolate rock which had the dubious distinction of being possibly the only planet in existence where it rained just about all day, every day, every year. And it wasn't just a normal day, either; Varista, the miserable hunk of rock, rotated so damn slow that each day lasted ninety-six hours. Ninety-six hours of rain every day for a year was enough to drive a man mad, especially since his job had been as a scout for Ironwarp Corporation, which had him out in the damn rain just about every damn hour of every damn day. And that wasn't the worst of it. As a scout, his assignment had been to warn Ironwarp about any imperial troops in the area, which had made him feel like a total ass, because no self-respecting imperial cruiser was actually going to _land_ on the pathetic little world and try to expose Ironwarp's pathetic little small-time black market operations, which were so small-time they hardly even warranted the name 'black market.' It was more like the gray market, and probably not even that. It was hardly even a market. More like just 'gray.' And the fact that he'd been working for a group that called themselves Ironwarp Corp didn't exactly fill him with pride, either, both because it was a ridiculous, pompous name that sounded completely stupid, and because Ironwarp described nothing that the pathetic little outfit did in the first place.

But he'd kept up with the job until he'd managed to get enough credits to get himself off that sad, rainy world, at which point he'd discovered his long-standing love for star travel. There was really something to be said for the sheer _wonder_ of it all, what with being able to observe first-hand the beauty and just utter _massiveness_ of the universe. Of course, no one ever said anything about the sheer wonder of it all, the unappreciative bastards. He was glad that they didn't, though, because they would have no doubt said it in a way to make it sound really stupid and corny and just have taken all the wonder out of it. Right after he'd left Varista, that was right about when he'd become such a dedicated individualist, mainly because up there with the stars, a guy could actually dream of _being_ someone, of doing something important, and not just trudging along in the miserable damn rain all day for a pathetic outfit that called themselves Ironwarp and thought that they were black marketeers, but were really just a bunch of posturing, puffed-up gray bastards trying to feel all important but only succeeding in looking like posturing, puffed-up gray bastards.

His thoughts were rudely interrupted by a knock on the door of the dorm room. "Yeah, who is it?" Taren called out, looking up from a book he was reading. That was how pathetic the dorm rooms were. They didn't even have terminals, and you actually had to read _books_, for crying out loud, which was just about impossible to do, what with the miserable, half-burned-out lights and all.

Instead of saying who he was, like any polite would-be guest would have, the guy on the other side of the door just said, "Is this Jarron Fern's room?" He had this really deep voice that sounded awfully familiar.

"Jarron Fern?" Taren repeated inquisitively, shaking his head. "No, it-"

"Yeah, I'm Jarron Fern," Vastiar interrupted him. Before he'd taken up the name Vastiar, which was right after he'd left Varista, he'd been called Jarron Fern. He'd dropped the name because it sounded like the name of someone who'd been assimilated, and because he wasn't particularly keen on remembering his unhappy, pointless days on rainy old Varista.

Taren looked at him blankly. "What do you mean, you're Jarron Fern?"

"Old nickname I went by when I was a kid," Vastiar explained, smiling dryly.

"That sounds like you all right, Jare old boy," the man outside the door was saying. "Don't you recognize my voice? C'mon, open up, pal." Vastiar _did_ recognize his voice, but he couldn't quite place where he recognized it from. Probably some puffed-up gray bastard from Ironwarp Corp.

When he opened the door, though, he was surprised to discover that the man standing there was _not_, in fact, a puffed-up gray bastard. Well, he was something of a bastard, but he wasn't puffed-up or gray. Vastiar's face broke into a wide grin and he warmly clasped the hand of the man standing there, who laughed and asked him how he'd been.

"Old friend, Vast?" Taren asked, looking at the two with interest.

"Yep," Vastiar said, clapping the man on the shoulder. "This's Jakros Stevrul, an unscrupulous bastard if there ever was one. Jakros, meet Taren Auscarandos, my roommate."

Taren raised an eyebrow. "I'm honored. What kind of introduction is it to say someone is an 'unscrupulous bastard if there ever was one?'"

Vastiar grinned. "Me and Jakros worked together for this sad little outfit on Varista called Ironwarp Corp, and Jakros here conned the bastards at Ironwarp out of a king's ransom and made off with it in some smuggler's starship before they knew they'd been had. Slickest piece of work I ever saw. We always swore we'd get off that rain-soaked rock, and old Jakros beat me to it by a year or more."

Jakros was looking at Vastiar curiously. "Taren called you 'Vast.' You traveling incognito or something?"

"Nope. Changed my name."

"Any particular reason?"

"Jarron Fern's a pathetic name. Jarron Fern's the name of someone who's been assimilated." He silently dared Jakros to disagree.

He didn't. Instead, he decided to be a wiseass: "I was thinking of changing my name, too, actually. I've always wanted to be called the Death Master of Ice, after all. If that's taken - and you know it is, since it's such a great name - I'll settle for Black Doom Dragon, or even Serpent of Destruction."

"How droll. Your jokes have obviously not gotten any better since I saw you last."

Jakros grinned. "Hey, you should talk. You changed your name to 'Vast.' What the hell's that supposed to mean? A vast what?"

He snorted back laughter. "I changed my name to Vastiar, not Vast, you old bastard."

Jakros walked into the small, pathetic dorm room and shut the door behind him. "Good God," he commented, gazing around at the room. Actually, he didn't have to do much gazing, since the room was so pitifully small that he could pretty much see it all without even moving his head. "I've been in cockpits bigger than this place. Why the hell you live in this dump, Jare?" That was what he'd always used to call him. 'Jare.' That was even worse than Jarron. Jarron sounded at least a tiny bit original; 'Jare' sounded so assimilated he might as well have turned himself into a droid and gotten it over with. It wasn't like Jakros was trying to offend him, but Vastiar couldn't help but taking offense anyway. He was pretty touchy when he wanted to be.

"Why do you think, Jak? Did you bother giving this place the once-over before you landed? This whole damn temple is a dump!"

"Okay..." Jakros said slowly. "So why do you live in the temple at all?"

"I'm involved," Vastiar said shortly.

"In anything in particular? Or just kind of generally involved?"

Vastiar rolled his eyes. "I'm in training to be a Jedi, if you must know."

Jakros stared at him. Taren watched them both amusedly.

"What?" Vastiar said, suddenly defensive.

Abruptly, Jakros broke into booming laughter. "Jedi!" he repeated, gasping. "Oh, man, I swear, I thought you were being serious for a second there, Jare! I..." he trailed off as he noticed that there wasn't a trace of humor on his old friend's face. "Don't tell me you _were_ serious."

"I was."

"You're in training to be a Jedi."

"Yes."

"A _Jedi_. One of those mystical guys with the laser swords who mumble about the Force all the time."

Vastiar scowled. "Yes, goddammit, Jak. A Jedi. A mystical guy with a laser sword who mumbles about the Force all the time. That's what I'm in training to be, damn you, and I'm loving every minute of it."

"But..." Jakros shook his head. "I thought you wanted to be a space pilot and all that, Jare."

"I do," he said blandly. "But it can wait. It's not every day you get the opportunity to learn to be a Jedi."

Jakros was still shaking his head. "Jare, who the hell says they want to teach you to be a Jedi? Open your eyes, pal, you're being conned."

"Luke Skywalker."

"Who the hell's Luke Skywalker? Some damn charlatan, I'll bet. You've got to be a charlatan with a name like Skywalker."

Vastiar snorted. "You don't even know the guy, Jak. Don't stand there and judge him, because trust me, you're not fit to. This guy's the real thing. You can meet him, if you want to. He's teaching anybody who wants to learn."

Jakros laughed. "Anybody, huh? 'Be a Jedi in twenty-one days!' Sorry, pal, not for me, even if this guy is legit."

He shrugged. "Well, your loss, then." Then he looked at his friend curiously. "So why'd you decide to come here, anyway? How'd you even know I was here?"

"I got a few connections," he explained vaguely. "And it's not like you're real hard to find."

"No," Vastiar agreed, "I'm not. So why are you here? I assume you didn't just fly a few hundred light-years to have a bull session with your old pal Jarron."

Jakros coughed, giving Taren a sidelong glance.

Vastiar rolled his eyes, sarcasm lacing his voice. "Jak, don't worry. Taren's an okay guy. I'm sure he can keep whatever top-secret information you're privy to to himself."

Jakros hesitated, then shrugged. "Ah, what the hell. Your judgment of character was always pretty good." He narrowed his brows. "Okay, here's the deal, Jare. This source that I trust, he thinks that something big's about to break loose."

"This source that you trust?" Vastiar repeated. "Okay, Jak, no offense here, but please don't try to be all conspiratorial about this. If you're going to tell us the deal, give us the _whole_ deal. Who's this 'source you trust?' Darth Vader?"

Jakros scowled slightly. "His name's Han Solo. He's a Corellian smuggler, a little disreputable, but I trust him. I've done business with him once or twice, and he's reliable and surprisingly honest. He's also the guy that smuggled me off Varista. Anyway," he continued, "Solo thinks that something big's about to break loose, like I said. He's kind of disenchanted with the Alliance, although he tries not to show it, the phony bastard, and I was talking to him one night about a week ago at this crummy cantina on Commenor right after we'd finished a pretty damn profitable deal. He was a little drunk, and was talking about how the Alliance had just retaken Commenor and how great it was and all that, and then he got to talking about the 'new threat to the Alliance.' Said it was this confederacy created by these hardcore quasi-anarchists in the Roulander system, and that they're mobilizing an assault fleet to destroy the Alliance before it can consolidate its power. Kept talking about how the Alliance is doomed and that the war will drag on and on and all that other stuff. Pretty depressing bastard, Solo, when he gets drunk.

"So that's why I came back here, Jare. Believe it or not, I _do_ care about the guy that kept my sorry ass going all those miserable years on Varista, and I felt like I had to warn you. Jare, if this goes down and this Roulanderan confederacy or whatever they call themselves _does_ smash the Alliance, that makes you and all the other guys here traitors."

Vastiar shrugged. "Jak, anytime you take a side in a battle, the other side's going to call you a traitor. It doesn't bother me."

"That's fine, but I wouldn't have felt right if I hadn't told you. I didn't want you to get blindsided, you know?"

"Yeah," Vastiar said, grinning sincerely at his oldest friend. "I know." He paused, then added: "Since you just arrived and all, how would you feel about sharing a room with me and my roomate here?"

Jakros looked skeptically at the small, pathetic room, then grinned back. "Ah, sure, what the hell. It ain't worse than the shithole we lived in on Varista, and it's too late to find a room for myself anyway."

--

Surprisingly, Wedge Antilles was up early the next morning.

Most days on Endor were very pleasant, but that was not the case today. The long hours before dawn were unusually cold, and a chill drizzle fell drearily from the sky, which was a flat, sullen darkness now, and would be a flat, sullen grayness once the sun rose. The vibrant jungles of the moon even seemed strangely subdued: the cold rain had driven the creatures of the forest back into their dens, and the plant life hung heavy and somber as the drizzle slowly had built up and weighed them down.

Wedge could hold his liquor better than most men, although in this case, that mattered little, since Wedge had scarcely taken a sip from his wine the previous night. His spirits had been dampened by the fears and suspicions that never seemed to leave him.

He pushed open a small side door to the barracks that he shared with several other pilots, striding slowly, soberly out into the rain, his dark eyes distant. His speeder bike was resting in a shallow gully immediately to the right of the barracks, and he walked toward it. It was one of the imperial relics, one of the few that the Empire had actually used on Endor that had not been destroyed on the assault on the imperial soldiers stationed here. The Alliance had ordered their engineers to copy, and improve upon if possible, the speeder bike design and distribute them to any Alliance personnel who needed quick transportation over the moon. Speeder bikes were considerably cheaper to maintain and provide fuel for than air transports, after all. But the Alliance engineers had not released the new speeder bikes yet, so Wedge had one of a limited number available to the Alliance.

He was walking up to his bike when he was startled out of his contemplations by a voice. He glanced behind him to see who it was, and was surprised to discover Rance Se'karlen jogging toward him. Considering how drunk she'd been the night before, her hangover actually seemed comparatively minor, although it was obvious that she wasn't exactly enjoying life at the moment.

"Hello, Rance," he said dully.

"Um, Wedge," she began, panting from her exertions. "Look, I, uh, just wanted to, well, you know..."

He sighed. "Apologize?" he suggested sardonically.

"Yes." She smiled self-deprecatingly. "Apologize. For last night."

"You should apologize to Tars, not me. He's the one with the black eye."

"Tars isn't awake yet. He always sleeps in after he's been drinking the night before."

He nodded, then began to pull himself up onto his speeder.

"Wedge," she said, "I really am sorry."

"I'm surprised you even remember."

She smiled wryly. "Oh, yes, I remember _everything_ I do when I'm drunk. My burden, I suppose, eh?"

"I suppose."

"Do you accept my apology?"

He hesitated, then nodded, shrugging. "Sure, I guess so. Why the hell not, right?"

"Because I remember you said you had something important to tell me - us - and I kind of, well, cut you off."

He snorted back laughter. "Cut me off, and made a bunch of bad jokes, then jumped up on the table and started a bar brawl."

"Yeah," she said, embarrassed. "That, too. So, I just wanted to let you know, I'm sorry about all that. You still, you know, want to tell me whatever it is you had in mind last night?"

He looked at her for a few moments, then gave in. She was the sort of person that it was impossible to stay mad at: she was impetuous and thoughtless, but had a good heart and made a genuine apology later if she'd hurt anyone. She was also very pretty. Her skin was flawless and slightly tanned, and her eyes were partcularly striking: large and sort of an amber color. She was of average height - a bit shorter than he was - and slender as a whip, with high, proud breasts and long, wiry limbs. Wedge thought that she would have looked more attractive with long hair, but even as it was, with her short, thick, tousled auburn hair rain-slicked and unwashed, she was one of the best-looking women he had ever seen.

There was actually three speeder bikes in the gully. Wedge did not know who the other two belonged to, but he didn't comment when Rance mounted one and started the engine; he knew her to be an excellent pilot, and knew that she wouldn't damage it. He nodded to her, and the speeders bolted into the jungle.

Although he was dressed in a sturdy hide jacket over his worn flight suit, the cold rain became much more pronounced as he raced along on the hovering speeder, jabbing into his unprotected face and lightly clothed legs with unexpected ferocity. His helmet, strong and tough as it was, did little to ward the rain off his head, and his short dark hair was soon dripping icy water down his face and neck. For all the cold, though, he felt better than he had since the day Luke had led Rogue Squadron to attack the trio of Platinum-K6's holding a freighter hostage. Of all the men he could have chosen to lead him, he liked being under the command of Luke Skywalker the best, and wished that he had not forsaken his place at Rogue Squadron's head in favor of training a bunch of kids to be Jedi knights.

But he didn't think of that now, his eyes fixed ahead of him on the trees of the jungle, racing by, dodging, swerving, barrelling around them, accelerating ever faster, barely feeling the icy tendrils of water dribbling down his skin. He glanced for a split second to his right and saw Rance racing alongside him, helmetless, grinning with the exertion.

"You think you're pretty fast, don't you, Antilles?" she shouted, exhilarated, then gunned her accelerator and pulled ahead of him.

Rising readily to the challenge, he likewise maxed out his engine, his muscles taut and his eyes straining to discern the trees ahead of them through the freezing winds and rain. He hadn't thought to be going this fast so he had neglected to wear his flight goggles, and was now seriously regretting that decision. Rance, who was known for her incredible reflexes, seemed to be having less trouble, and laughed as she weaved swiftly through the trees and the brush, racing farther and farther ahead of Wedge's speeder with every passing moment. He grimaced and tried to straighten out his path to regain lost ground, and barely managed to swerve around an ancient, gnarled tree that stood like a rock in his path, letting off the accelerator for a moment, then jumping to max speed once again, very nearly knocking himself off his own speeder with the acceleration; it felt something like running into a cement wall.

Rance, traveling about with about as much speed as was possible with the speeder bike, was likewise not wearing goggles, although since she wasn't wearing a helmet, either, there wasn't a steady stream of freezing water blowing into her eyes like there was from Wedge's helmet's protruding front. She still had the rain itself to contend with, though, as well as the unsettling knowledge that, helmetless, if she lost control for even a moment, she was probably dead. Not that this seemed to bother her in the slightest. The fiery excitement burned hot in her eyes as she guided the speeder through increasingly tight twists and turns as they wound their way deeper into the thick jungle, and the speeder's repulsors' trademark humming sound had changed to a sharp whistle at the speed she was traveling.

Wedge, determined not to lose, gathered up his courage and flitted toward a thick stand of old, wide-trunked trees that Rance had avoided entirely, banking sharply to her left and going around the stand and losing considerable time, if not speed, in the bargain. He could tell that the stand was possible to maneuver through, but he was also well-aware what a daunting task it would be, and that he probably faced some serious broken bones, if not flaming death, if he wasn't quick enough with the speeder's controls. Before he could dwell on those sobering facts for more than a split-second, however, the stand of trees was already upon him, and he jerked the handles sharply to avoid a light-barked tree half-hidden in the shadows, startling two exotic-looking birds out of their favorite retreat, squawking indignantly in protest. His senses as acute and focused as they would ever be, Wedge skillfully darted through three staggered, closely-spaced trees, then just missed a fourth, swerving rapidly to one side. A fifth loomed suddenly ahead of him, he swung aside. A sixth, an agile swerve to the left. A seventh, easily dodged, then an eighth and a ninth straight behind it, swathed in cloaking shade, that he barely managed to detect in time to maneuver in between them. Their rough old bark came within a hair's breadth of grazing the sides of his speeder. The tenth, eleventh, twelveth trees were placed in a more forgiving formation, and he danced around their trunks swiftly and surely. The thirteenth, he evaded with a sharp move to the right.

Then he was free of the thick stand, and racing beside Rance once more.

She looked at him for a second, surprised either that he had managed to catch up with her, or that he had had the guts to go through the stand of trees that she had avoided entirely. When her eyes darted back to the jungle ahead of her, there was a vine-adorned tree straight ahead, and she pulled to one side, somehow managing to avoid contact with it. The granite boulder behind it was not so forgiving, and she wasn't able to maneuver aside in time. The edge of her speeder bike grazed the boulder, and she was sent, careening, spinning, toward two trees in the rapidly approaching distance. Wedge slowed and watched, enraptured, waiting for the inevitable collision with the trees that would end his squad-mate's life in a roaring explosion.

But it didn't come.

Instead, Rance, miraculously keeping her sense of direction, somehow managed to maintain sharp enough thought to manually disable her right engine. The thrust, now being provided solely by the left engine, not only counteracted the spin, steadying the bike, but it sent the speeder into a sharp right turn, avoiding the trees by a safe margin. Safe from immediate danger, she killed both engines and coasted her speeder slowly over to Wedge.

"I'm impressed," he said, after a moment of respectful silence.

"I'm not," she replied, smiling dryly. "But I _am_ alive. I'll have to make do."

He didn't respond to that, sitting quietly astride his speeder, thinking.

"So," she prompted him, her captivating, intelligent amber eyes boring into him, "are you going to share your thoughts with me from last night, Wedge?"

He sighed and hopped off his speeder, then nodded. "Yes, I am." He paused, trying to think of the best way to phrase it. "Rance...I think the Alliance is fracturing."

"Fracturing?" she inquired, puzzled. "What do you mean?"

He looked at her intently. "It's something I've noticed for awhile now, but haven't really been able to put a finger on. The political factions within the Alliance have always had their disagreements with each other, but up until recently, they've been relatively minor. I guess since there was always the threat of the Empire looming over us, we put aside our differences to fight for the common good."

"So you're saying that now that the Empire's dissolving, the common good is gone and the political conflicts will get worse?"

He shook his head. "No. What I'm saying is that the political conflicts have already gotten worse. Most people aren't even aware of it, but at the highest levels of the Alliance, there are now very sharp divisions between the leaders in how to best proceed in building a government to rule over the 'New Republic.' They've even given themselves names: Admiral Willard's faction calls itself the Federals, I know, Drayson's is called the Liberators, Ackbar's faction's the Primists, and so on. And the faction warring's getting worse every day. Two days ago, there was a purported attempt on Admiral Drayson's life. Everyone, including Drayson himself, denies it, of course, but even so...

"And that's not the worst of it, assassinating the political leaders. The Federals, in particular, are very dogmatic in their beliefs, and I've heard a few of the mechanics and pilots talking of open revolt. _Open revolt_, Rance! Six months after we win our decisive battle against the Empire, people within our own military are ready to fight yet another rebellion, this time against the ones that they helped become the victors last time."

She nodded somberly. "Ridiculous, I agree. Another war..." She shook her head sadly. "No. It can't have come to that, not so soon."

"I don't think it has, either," he said. "But I think it's heading that way. Even Captain Strager, our own commanding officer, I'll swear is acting oddly of late. It's like he's trying too hard to appear as if he's following orders."

"I've noticed that, too," she agreed. "You think he's doing it to mask something underhanded?"

He sighed. "I don't know. I can't say. Maybe. It's possible."

"Nothing concrete, though."

"No," he said, sighing again. "No, nothing concrete. Just a cargo hold full of suspicions, paranoia, and allegations." He stared at her, at her gorgeous amber-colored eyes. "You know what it's like, Rance?"

"Like what's like?" she asked curiously.

"This whole situation." His voice turned more than a touch bitter. "It's like there's this giant, coiled snake, poised to strike, and it's laughing at us, at me, at you, at Tars, at all of us, because we're trapped, Rance. We're caught in the middle with no way out. If infighting in the Alliance _does_ break out, where does that leave us, the Alliance's pilots? We lose no matter what happens, we poor souls who actually believe in the Alliance as a whole, not just some petty faction."

She nodded slowly. "And what _will_ you do if infighting breaks out, Wedge Antilles?"

"I don't know," he responded sadly. "I really don't know."

--

"You have a job here?"

"Yes, I have a job here," Vastiar responded irritably, tightening the belt of his brown technician's jumpsuit. "Don't look so surprised, Jak. What, did you think I had some huge trust fund from working on Varista that I could live off of for the rest of my life?"

"Well, no, but..."

"Well, I don't. Tell you the truth, I just barely had enough for fare on the passenger ship that got me off that damn rock. Unlike you, I'm not the kind of guy who swindles the guys that he's working for."

Jakros grinned. "Hey, I'm not that kind of guy, either. But it was _Ironwarp_. C'mon, those bastards deserved to be robbed."

He shrugged. "Say what you want. I'm no thief."

"Not a good one, anyway."

"Not one at all, you old bastard."

"But I bet you wish you were. I mean, _I'd_ wish I was if I wasn't."

"That's because you're an unscrupulous bastard."

"An unscrupulous bastard with his own starship."

Vastiar shrugged, strapping on his tool belt. It jangled. "A starship, huh?"

"Yep."

"I'll be damned. Didn't know you'd conned those gray bastards for enough to buy your own damn starship. What make is it? You know, what model and all?"

"Anchor-12."

Vastiar raised an eyebrow. "Anchor-12iMX or Anchor-12L?" The Anchor-12iMX was one of the newer craft from Trakkom Enterprises, an innovative outfit that was based in one of the fringe systems and thus had escaped nationalization by the Empire. Neither the Alliance or the Empire had opted to use the craft as a combat fighter, since it was, after all, nominally a cargo freighter, but it certainly could have functioned easily enough as an attack craft. It was only medium-sized, larger than X-wings and TIE fighters but considerably smaller than the command cruisers, but it was equipped with formidable laser and missile batteries, and the newest upgrade, the Anchor-12iMXr, also had an ion cannon mounted on its belly. The Anchor-12iMX also featured a top-of-the-line, highly stable hyperdrive and had optimized the sublight engines for rapid evasions. The Anchor-12L was a sublight-only hauler manufactured by the now-defunct Davleros Corporation and was an obsolete, utterly pathetic trash heap of a ship that traveled about as fast as the Sarlacc digested its victims. In other words, not too damn fast.

So, naturally, Jakros responded, "12L."

"In other words," Vastiar said dryly, "your 'starship' ain't worth a damn."

"Well, what the hell'd you expect?" Jakros demanded, miffed. "12iMX my ass, you old bastard! You have any idea at all what those things cost? How the hell am I going to get enough credits to buy one of them?" He sighed. "And anyway, my L isn't the shitheap you probably think it is. It's in the best shape I've _ever_ seen a 12L in, and I've made enough money to retrofit the old thing with a hyperdrive."

"I hope so. Sure isn't much of a starship if it doesn't have a hyperdrive."

"Exactly. I just did a few local runs out in the Roulander system, which is where old Solo dropped me off at, then got an engineer to stick a hyperdrive in the old thing. Works like a charm. You'd never know it wasn't supposed to be there."

"12L's aren't made for hyperspace, Jak. You're lucky it didn't implode or fall into a black hole or something, since there's no built-in coordinator."

Jakros shrugged, pulled a thin hemp cigarette from his pocket and lit it. "Hey, the old compiler works fine for me, Jare. And anyway, since you're so concerned for my welfare, you'll be pleased to know," he took a couple puffs on the cigarette, "that as soon as I've got enough credits, I'm trading in the L and getting something new."

Vastiar clipped a blaster holster to his tool belt, securing it tightly. He glanced at Jakros's cigarette. "I'm surprised you could find one of those."

"Don't be." Jakros grinned. "You can get these things pretty much anywhere, now. Merchants are even selling 'em openly and all, with the Empire's edict that said they were illegal gone. Funny thing is, now that the legit guys can sell them in the open market, the pirateers are all broke as hell because no one wants to buy the crummy hemp that they sell."

He nodded. "Yep. I wonder why they even bothered to outlaw the things in the first place."

"Don't ask me. Was stupid, but at least it was pretty harmless. Ineffectual, you know? I'm surprised they didn't outlaw eating and shitting while they were at it."

Vastiar chortled. "I wouldn't have put it past the bastards. Anyway, you said you were getting something new after you saved up some credits?"

"You bet. I mean, I like the L alright and all that, but let's face it, that old piece of junk's just no good in a dogfight."

He raised an eyebrow. "You get into a lot of dogfights? What the hell you hauling?"

Jakros laughed. "No, haven't gotten into any dogfights yet. Probably _won't_, either, if I can keep a cool head and not piss anyone off. But I want a new ship all the same, if for no other reason than that the old L's just boring."

"I can believe that. What kind of ship you looking to buy?"

"I don't actually know yet. Can't decide, you know? I mean, hell, I love the new Anchor. Not the upgraded 12iMX with that crummy ion cannon and all, I'm talking about that completely new model that Trakkom just put up on the market. Anchor-KRX. Love that thing to death."

"Yeah?" Vastiar wasn't particularly up-to-date on advances in starfighter technology, and hadn't even heard of a ship called the Anchor-KRX. "What's so special about it?"

"Bunch of stuff," Jakros responded, obviously warming up to a favorite topic. "For example, you know how the 12iMX had those old PinArc-3's as tertiary stabilizers? Well, the guys at Trakkom finally wised up and junked those things, and now they've installed Arium-X's in their place, and let me tell you, the KRX can turn so much faster than the 12iMX that it isn't even funny. The primary stabilizers have been upgraded, too, so they're four-point-five times as strong as the old ones, which is completely amazing. This thing could just about fly into a black hole and stay perfectly level.

"And they replaced those outdated Incom laser batteries with these suped-up rail guns that this little company, RemecerTek or something, in the Roulander system developed, and I cannot even begin to describe to you how absolutely bad-assed these guns are. They don't have the brute force of that thing that the Empire stuck on their Death Star - you know, the weapon that blew up Alderaan - but they shoot these little shells so damn fast that they supposedly can take out a fully-shielded Star Destroyer in about two shots. And they're _rapid-fire_. I didn't even know a rapid-fire rail gun was even possible to make, but these guys at RemecerTek did it, so these guns can send out a goddamned rain of death. One guy could probably take out a whole damn fleet of Star Destroyers if he knew what he was doing, you know? And I'll tell you what else, you know how the 12iMX's were officially classified as freighters? Well, the KRX's outer shell is actually based on this old imperial ship called the Platinum-K6, which was this experimental fighter craft with a tracking system built into its hyperdrive that no one ever got to work right, and the P-K6 was a pretty damn small ship, so the KRX's aren't nominally freighters anymore. That means that Trakkom stopped putting in that fat, heavy cargo bay, so the KRX can maneuver a hell of a lot faster than any of the other Anchor ships."

Vastiar smirked slightly. "You can't afford a 12iMX, but you're looking to buy this KRX that's even _better_? Good luck, Jak."

"I didn't say I could afford it, wiseass. I just said that you better believe I'd like to have one. It's not too damn likely I'll get one, I'll admit, but I'm not too worried, because let me tell you, there's a bunch of other, cheaper, fighters that I like just as well. Like that Raider-5M2, you know, the last model that Incom made before the goddamned Empire nationalized the poor bastards?"

"I know. They're one of the Alliance's primary attack crafts. Everyone here calls them X-wings."

Jakros laughed. "X-wings, huh? Well, it's a hell of a better name, I'll give 'em that much."

"An X-wing wouldn't make a very good freighter, you know," Vastiar informed his old friend dryly.

"Yeah, yeah. I just said I liked them and all, not that I was actually going to go out and buy one. I'll probably just end up getting something sturdy, you know, but not flashy and all that. Like an Alcras-B or something, with a lot of cargo room but not so good at stuff like dogfights. I'll work my way up the ladder. Start with my shitty old 12L, work my way up to an Alcras-B, then maybe a 12iMX if I can line my pockets and all."

"Not a KRX?"

"Nah. Like I said, you know, KRX isn't much of a freighter. Hell of a ship, though. Hell of a ship."

Vastiar finished lacing up his boots, and then they both sat against the bed in the dorm room in silence. Taren had already left for the day; he did mostly clerical work for one of the Navy lieutenants. Didn't seem to mind the work, though, and never complained. Vastiar didn't care much for working as a droid technician, but it sure as hell beat what he'd been doing on Varista, so he was sticking with it for now. It allowed him to continue studying under Luke Skywalker, and he'd have probably worked as a scout in the rain again if that was what the Master required.

Vastiar and Jakros had talked late into the night, reminiscing, laughing about old times and shared misery on rainy Varista, pulling tricks on the gray bastards are Ironwarp and all. Jakros had said that he only intended to stay for a short time - two or three days or so - before he had to head out again to finish some business he was on. Contract hauling, no doubt. He'd urged Vastiar to dump the Alliance, but he'd steadfastly refused.

Then Jakros said something unexpected: "Jare, your ambition is gone."

"No," Vastiar replied, shaking his head, "it's just channeled in a different direction, now."

"The direction of your Jedi training." It wasn't a question.

He nodded. "That's right. My life revolves around Master Skywalker's training. All my ambition is channeled in that direction." He smiled slightly. "I'm an energetic, ambitious guy, Jak, but even I've got my limits. Training in the ways of the Force saps an unbelievable amount of your vitality from you."

"I still say you're being conned, Jare."

"And I still reply that you're in no position to judge me or Master Skywalker." He stood up straight and tall. "Jak, you want something from me, don't you?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"I want you to come with me, Jarron." Jakros's voice was earnest and guileless. "Remember, back on Varista, how we always said that we'd become space pilots one day? Jare, this is our chance to do just that! Trust me, I've been up there and I've made the pilot's life my own, and it's as good - no, better! - than we ever dreamed on that miserable mudhole! Jare...up there, there's this indescribable feeling that you get, when you're sailing along with the stars, a hundred billion miles away from any other living being, it's...it's..."

Vastiar's eyes closed, and he said the word with a quiet reverence: "Freedom."

"Yes, freedom!" Jakros affirmed. "That's a good word for it. You're free up there, Jare. Like you can never be here on Endor, or on Varista, or on any planet in the entire galaxy!"

"I know, Jak," Vastiar said, more than a touch regretfully. "I've never been a pilot, but I know what you're talking about just the same. Staring at a clear night sky, scattered with stars, you can feel it, and it pulls at you."

Jakros nodded eagerly. "Exactly, Jare! So come with me! You'd make a good pilot, I'm sure of it, and you could be my partner until we've saved up enough to buy you your own ship, and then we-"

"No." He cut him off sharply. He softened his voice slightly before he continued, but there was still a hard, final edge about it. "Jak, don't misunderstand, I want to. The stars cry out to me louder than you can possibly imagine, stranded here on Endor with those endless, clear night skies over my head, and I would like nothing better than to forsake everything here and trek the galaxy with you. But I can't. I must continue my training here; my training is the whole of my existence for now. Later, perhaps, after I've completed my training, after I've become a Jedi like Master Skywalker and he can teach me no more, _then_ I will join you as a star pilot. But not before. This is too important. Far too important."

"Jare, I...I mean, you, but..." He flailed around for the right words, frustrated. But when he stared into Vastiar's fiery, determined eyes, his eagerness seemed to burn itself out all of a sudden, and he sighed bitterly. "Jare, I think you're throwing your life away on a con, you know that?"

Vastiar nodded. "I know."

"It's just such a waste. Look...Jare, Vastiar, whatever you're calling yourself now...just...just think about it, okay?"

"I will," he promised.

But they both knew that his mind was already set.

--

Aurens was at once relieved and worried that Princess Leia was not in class that day.

When Master Skywalker stepped to the front of the assembled students, now numbering almost a hundred, a respectful silence fell over them as they waited for him to speak. Everyone in the class respected the Master, of course, but today it was a bit more pronounced, as the majority of them had witnessed how he'd rescued her the previous day, and soundly defeated the princess without taking or giving so much as a scratch to either combatant.

The Master was typically cheerful and good-natured, but today, his face looked weary and despondent, depressed. He looked years older, and he led them through the customary warm-up exercises with little enthusiasm or animation, giving only a cursory greeting and introductory speech to the three new trainees, all of whom looked slightly uncomfortable with their somber teacher.

After the exercises, Master Skywalker stood at the front of the class and cleared his throat.

"Some of you," he began, his voice about as warm as an icicle, "are undoubtedly wondering what transpired yesterday. Although I respect her privacy, I feel that it is important for all of you to know what has happened to the princess. Simply put, she is not well. I do not know what effect her illness will have on her status as a Councillor, and I request that none of you delve into or try to influence the matter in any way. These are her private affairs and we should allow her to conduct them as she sees fit, or as dictated by her current state of illness." He sighed, and Aurens noticed that he was speaking slower than usual, and his tone contained some strong emotion, buried beneath the icy barrier that he attempted to project. She couldn't quite discern it, though. "However, Princess Leia will _not_ be continuing her studies to become a Jedi. I did not make this decision easily or gladly, but I feel that further training in the ways of the Force could only hurt her, and, possibly, one of you as well, so I cannot in good conscience allow her to continue training."

Sadness, that was it. Sadness and regret.

"That being said," he continued, his voice still stiff, cold, and formal, "training will go on as usual. All of you, retrieve your practice sabers from the crate. I will inspect you as you spar. And," he added, "I will be switching your sparring partners if you have sparred the same person more than three days in a row, or if you and your partner appear to be mismatched. Sparring the same person over and over, or sparring someone a lot better or worse than you, is something I wish to avoid."

Aurens chose Vastiar for her partner, and they trained.

--

Leia sat with Han Solo, her fiance, in their chambers.

It was partially refurbished, but evidence of the fire that had destroyed it was still all too plain: the scorch marks on the walls, the blackened carpeting, scattered debris that had not yet been cleaned up. A new bed had been brought in, though, and although it was not as luxurious as the old one had been, it served its purpose. Han sat on the new bed, now, his face and thoughts unreadable. Neither of them had spoken to each other, yet, not since the...incident.

Han's ruggedly handsome face was uncustomarily weary when he finally did break the silence, but his voice was firm and strong. "Leia," he said, "Luke told me what happened."

She smiled bitterly. "I figured he might."

"Don't condemn him for it, Leia. He just thought it was important that I hear it."

"Hear it? Han, everyone has heard of it, or at least some twisted version of it. It's echoing around the halls of the temple, getting further and further distorted with each telling of the story. Can you believe," here her smile actually contained a trace of true mirth, "that some of these fools believe I'm a reincarnation of Darth Vader?"

"Yes," he replied bluntly. "Yes, I can believe that some of these gossipers would be willing to believe that. What would they say, I wonder, if they were to learn that you were the daughter of Darth Vader?"

"I am not the daughter of Darth Vader," she responded sharply. "I am the daughter of Anakin Skywalker."

He smiled blandly. "They're one and the same."

"No, they're not. Not in my mind."

"How do you know that? You certainly never met your father before he became Darth Vader."

She turned from him. "But I feel as though I have. Or perhaps it's just my imagination creating a picture of what I would have wanted him to be, but no matter. To me, he is not the same person as Darth Vader."

Han seemed amused by that. "You've put a man you never knew on a pedestal, have you? Well, it's common enough, I suppose."

She didn't respond.

"Leia," he said, "Luke felt that it was important that I hear an undistorted version of the story. That's all."

She shrugged. "I can believe that. But why do you assume that Luke knows an undistorted version of the story?"

"Are you saying he doesn't?"

"I'm saying I suspect that he doesn't." She turned to face him, her dark eyes glittering. "What did he tell you, Han?"

"He said that you attacked him with a practice lightsaber after breaking a woman's knee. That you lusted for blood. That you truly wanted to hurt him."

She nodded. "All true. But does he know the cause of my actions?"

"If he did, he didn't tell me."

"I doubt he knows. I'll bet that he has some interesting theories cooked up, but I don't think he knows the truth."

"Oh? And what _is_ the truth?"

She didn't answer him, instead turning and walking towards the door, her thoughts clear and focused and strong, for the first time in what seemed like an eternity. Luke had forbidden her to continue her training that morning, just like that. She had somehow knew that he was going to say it, but when he did, it still hit her like a ton of bricks just the same, and the dark anger that she'd felt in her fight with Locke roiled deep within her once again. It was the anger that cleared her thoughts, that allowed her to concentrate so well. The anger, she knew, that was the key to the Force that she had been missing before, as she'd stood those long hours, alone in her room, reaching out to it in vain.

But her anger allowed her to finally grasp that which had eluded her for so long, to drink at the wonderful spring of power that was the Force. She did not hold onto the Force now, and had not allowed herself to since her encounter with Locke, in fear that it would once more make her lose control. There was elation in the Force, certainly, and the most wonderful feeling of power, but she knew all too well that she was far too inexperienced to even hope to guide, to control that immense power, to use it for her own ends. Instead, she was swept away in the flood of the Force burning through her body, completely at the mercy of its every whim.

Soon, though. Soon she would have the power under control, and then even Luke could not forbid her to access the Force.

"Leia, tell me," Han was saying, looking at her earnestly. "What is the truth?"

Without sparing him so much as a glance, she strode coldly from the room.

--

Sabrul Mantier saw her before she saw him.

He stood one of the six large service bays of Endor's flourishing commercial spaceport. Previously known as Taregiena'le City, the spaceport had come to be informally styled Freeport since the Alliance had set up their working government and command headquarters on the forest moon. Sabrul Mantier was the head mechanic of Dock 14-South, and was discussing the repair of a malfunctioning X-Wing with one of the newer mechanics when he looked up and saw Princess Leia's short, graceful form striding unhurriedly towards the Lower Terminal, where spacecraft took off and landed, and where passengers would load and unload. Excusing himself politely, he caught up to the Princess's slight form in a couple of steps with his long legs.

"Princess."

She turned and gazed coolly at him. He was not quite sure what he had been expecting, but her eyes were not fearful or angry in the slightest. Rather, she looked at him with a gleam in her eye that was almost cold, but somehow profoundly respectful at the same time. "Hello, Sabrul." She did not smile, but there was something about her, a subtle shift of the way she carried herself, that betrayed a small tinge of amusement.

"You have come to Taregiena'le," he said. He had been living on Endor for a long time, and it had never sat quite right to him to call the place Freeport. It was and always would be Taregiena'le, to him.

She did smile, now. "I have."

"To leave?"

"To leave."

He slowly nodded his head. "I thought you might choose this course."

She looked at him levelly. "Did you, now?"

"Yes. I don't think any of the others suspect, not even Master Skywalker."

She did not respond.

"I...know what it is like to want vengeance, Princess." He sighed. "I spent most of my life trying to get revenge."

She shook her head violently. "No. I'm not looking for vengeance, Mantier. You're wrong."

"Am I?"

"Yes. Yes, you are. I am leaving for my own reasons, not to seek out vengeance."

"What reasons are these? What could possibly be more important to you right now than performing your duties as a Councillor? The people of the Alliance _need_ you, Princess!"

She turned away. "They don't need me. I've done all I need to do for the Alliance. I've done more than my share!" She faced him. "They will do fine without me."

He did not answer her, and at length, she shook her head, turned, and began to walk away. Before she was out of earshot in the noisy airiness of the service bay, he suddenly called to her.

"Leia!"

She halfway turned, looked at him over her shoulder. It was the last time he would ever see her.

"May the Force...may the Force go with you, Leia."

A ghost of a smile touched her lips as she disappeared into the darkened corridor that led to the Lower Terminal.

--

--


End file.
